


Without Regret

by always_teatime



Category: RWBY
Genre: 7-13 references, Aromantic Character, Aromantic James Ironwood, Asexual Character, Asexual James Ironwood, Asexual aromantic character, Disassociation, Explosions, Fix-It, Gen, Internalized Prejudices, James Ironwood's Heart, James Ironwood's Semblance, James Lives Too, M/M, Mentions of past substance abuse and addiction, Military, PTSD processing, Permanent Injury, Platonic I Love You, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Prosthetics, Recovery from and references to surgery, Sacrifice, Self Harm, Staff of creation theory, Suicidal Thoughts, Vague 7-12 references, Vague Implied Gore from Explosion, Workplace Power Abuse, phantom sensation, workplace discrimination
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-01
Updated: 2021-01-07
Packaged: 2021-03-08 17:21:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 32,130
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27320392
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/always_teatime/pseuds/always_teatime
Summary: James uses the Staff of Creation to bring Clover back. It's an easy choice; he already tried to lay his life down for Clover a long time ago.But that's not the beginning of it, or the end.
Relationships: James Ironwood & Clover Ebi, James Ironwood & Qrow Branwen, Qrow Branwen/Clover Ebi
Comments: 30
Kudos: 53





	1. Your Shelter

**Author's Note:**

> This one is for people who want to see 1) Clover brought back; and 2) why James Ironwood would sacrifice himself to bring back Clover specifically. However, James doesn’t actually die. It has to do with his semblance.
> 
> This can be read as a full fix-it, or as a follow-up to an alternate 12/13 that only shared the same basic consequences. 7-12 references are very oblique. Broadly, something went wrong, Clover died, and people blame themselves and each other.
> 
> There will be a reference to 7-13’s gun violence against a minor. This is reframed, however, to show James believed he was looking at the previous adult Ozpin.
> 
> Important: Please help me out and continue to not discuss V8 onward in general, or RWBY writer commentaries on James's losses and prosthetics. The content here is difficult but staunchly affirming of James's humanity.
> 
> Regarding the workplace abuse, internalized phobias, and self destructive tags and triggers: These are drawn partly from personal experience and not intended to be stigmatizing. This is a high T rating. For a lower T fix-it, please see [From My Father](https://archiveofourown.org/works/22626097) and [My Father's House](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23264521).

It was noon on the sixth day, and Clover was alive.

Penny put the relic back in the vault. She sealed it there. Then she turned toward Qrow and Clover. The General had said she should take them to Ruby, but that first, they would need some time. Penny soon turned away to give them privacy, but it hadn’t taken a long look for her to see how much they did need time.

Clover held Qrow tightly against him, one arm around his waist and one around his heaving shoulders. Qrow pressed his face against Clover’s neck and spoke in fragments as Clover kissed Qrow’s hair and forehead.

Penny tried not to check on them too often. She kicked her legs, listening to the odd sound of the wind as it passed beneath Atlas.

She understood now what the General had done. He had given Qrow and Clover a gift, like Pietro gave her, when she came back to life recently herself. But the General had done what Pietro delicately warned her might happen to him one day, if she died again, and now the General was not coming back.

It didn’t seem fair that anyone ever had to say goodbye. It hurt when people left. It had sounded like the General felt the same way about that. It sounded like he’d rather go away than keep getting hurt himself.

Penny decided she’d be more careful with herself from here on out. That seemed like a good way to protect her friends, and Pietro, too. Surely friends preferred it when someone lived, rather than died, for them. She would discover ways to be there for her friends and let them help her, too, when she was feeling bad. The General always acted like he was protecting her, along with everybody else, but she’d rather everyone be a big family protecting each other.

She saw now that, in his way, the General had loved her. He called himself a guardian to her rather than a parent, but he never hesitated in calling her his daughter. He even taught her how to curl the ends of her hair by demonstrating with his prosthetic hand. She wished he had told her sooner than today that he saw her engineering as a bond between them, not an obstacle.

Maybe if she had known. Maybe if she had asked. Maybe they could have talked about how he was hurting.

She would listen to his last advice; she would not try to see any of this as her fault. But she would still miss him. She saw no contradiction between accepting his decision and being sad about it.

###

Earlier in the morning of that sixth day, Qrow once again found himself roused and dragged into James’s office. Neither of them spoke, at first.

Qrow had gotten his yelling and sobbing out of the way the first morning. And the second one, and the third, and so on. Soldiers walked him over at the start of every day, and Qrow screamed until he collapsed, at which point a doctor would help him back to his cell.

James had accepted everything silently, with a pain as plain as his patience.

Now, Qrow only felt adrift and empty. He couldn’t scream anymore. All he could do was look at James and feel the weight of their long history together.

James stood to one side of his desk with his hands clasped behind him. He wore so many layers, belts, and buckles. He carried so many tools and weapons. The angular folds of his uniform wrapped him up like armor. He’d had a cast on his left arm the first day, but that was gone now. Either the injury had healed, or James was ignoring it.

“You,” said Qrow, and James’s head lifted up. His blue eyes looked hard, like they never cried, but Qrow knew the truth. “You told me once… You said you try to make it easy for people to see who you are. To see what’s important to you.”

“Qrow,” started James. He raised his right hand—then stopped and let it fall. He clasped it again formally behind his back.

“You told me,” said Qrow, calling up the memory of a rooftop and deep blue night sky above them. “You told me… you knew. You knew you weren’t…” He shook his head and let the words drop. More than ever, he felt helpless before the ache, the weight, and the marching, stretching years of their past.

Long ago, James had said he knew he wasn’t naturally expressive. He hated that he was often seen as too stoic, so he tried to at least present himself like a book into which other people would read _trust_. For the type who liked authority, it even worked.

Qrow never liked authority.

Today, James looked torn in a familiar way. He said, “Go ahead. You can say what you want.”

Always the same circles between them.

Qrow saw now. He had thought they could talk again, get better. Why did it have to turn out like this between them?

“You once told me,” said Qrow, “it’s not easy for you to show people who you are. What are you trying to be for me now, Jimmy? What do you want so bad that you won’t leave me be?”

“At first,” said James, “I wanted you to help me reach Penny. She’s probably with your nieces, and they’d pick up the phone for you. I needed her to come back here and open the relic vault. As for who I am, well. I’m the only one who’s willing to do what needs to be done.”

“Abandoning Mantle.”

“Mantle’s already lost.” James gestured to one side, indicating the view out the window behind him. “Salem is here. We can only defend so much. But that might not be my call for much longer, and maybe that’s for the best. Qrow, I need to tell you something. There’s more to the relic than you know. It holds an incredible power that can turn this situation around, if we use it right.”

“Use it to protect the people.”

“I’m going to do more than that.”

“It can’t ever be easy with you, can it, Jimmy? Why can’t enough just be enough? Leave the magic where it is, and we’ll fight like we always have.”

“We have to fight together,” said James, softly.

“Yeah, well,” said Qrow, “you took that away from me.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You better be,” said Qrow. “It didn’t have to be like this.” He clutched at the pin he wore over his heart. “He’s the first person in a long time, that I… I thought I could be happy with him, you know?” He stared at James helplessly.

“I know.” James bowed his head. “I wanted that, too. I do want you to be happy, Qrow, and gods know I could never do that for you.”

“James, that...” That part at least… “That part was never your fault.”

Qrow tried to break down James’s armor, once. He wanted to strip all those layers away and see who James was when he wasn’t so controlled. What was left when there was nothing more that could be taken away, the same way the world took everything away from Qrow. If they both had nothing, Qrow once thought, they could have each other.

Yeah. Qrow burned a lot of bridges with James that way. In a desperate siege against James’s armor of dignity, he had tried to claw his way in closer. James rejected him by turns with fear, patience, anger, and grace.

He remembered sitting on top of a high Beacon tower under the night sky, and James gripping his hands and leaning against his side with an intensity and a need most people reserved for sex. He remembered James sobbing into his shoulder, after Qrow confessed to being in love with him.

That was the last rejection Qrow ever made James give.

There had always been a shame in James’s eyes after that, a guilt in the way he tried to take care of Qrow, and it hurt Qrow to look at that and know he’d done it, so he pulled further and further away, until they hardly saw each other, not for years.

He understood now that the way he’d acted toward James when they were younger wasn’t love. His feelings, yeah, maybe that had been something. But it was hard to say, with how Qrow used to be. In a way, how he still was. Back then, he’d fixated on anyone who showed him the smallest bit of kindness, and James had been the kindest person he ever met. Now that Qrow had got some distance and grown, he understood that tendency and desperation in himself was how he got taken in by Oz so easily. And he understood how much there was in James that Oz could just as easily have harnessed.

Always James’s deep blue eyes, with their way of drifting downward to consider nothing—and then lifting up, as though he found some kind of solace in the sky.

“Qrow,” said James, “we need to talk about something. I wanted to bring it up earlier. On the other days. But it really can’t wait anymore. And it shouldn’t. Something’s changed.”

“Oh, I know. Way ahead of you, Jimmy. Salem’s on your doorstep. Why don’t you just shove me out the front door and see how many Grimm I’m good for before my luck bites me for good?”

“Qrow! How can you say that? Have you lost your mind?”

“I’d rather lose my mind than my heart.”

James flinched.

Qrow rolled his eyes. “Come on. I didn’t mean it like that.”

“After a certain point,” said James, “it doesn’t matter whether you’re cruel or careless.”

Qrow looked away.

“Well.” James sighed. “We don’t have to talk. This isn’t about me. I’ve been working on something I want to show you. There’s something I want to give you. It took a while to get ready. And, since you don’t trust me, it’s best you see for yourself.”

They went down to the vault.

###

The Atlas ball. The open door. The air that felt less sour once he got away from the people, their drinks, and the light.

Qrow leaned against the balcony rail and breathed.

“Hey.” Clover found him, of course. “What are you doing out here? Don’t you like to dance?”

“I just needed some air.”

“Is there something on your mind?”

“There’s just… a lot of alcohol in there.”

“Ah. I get that.” Clover crossed his arms and leaned on the railing beside Qrow. “I’ve been there myself.”

“What?” Really?

Clover nodded. “It wasn’t alcohol. It was something else.”

Qrow felt like his world had tilted under him. He felt that way a lot around Clover. He clung to the railing for support and sneaked a glance at Clover beside him.

Clover looked peaceful, like he was exactly where he wanted to be. He smiled gently at Qrow and shifted one of his hands close enough that Qrow could take it, if he liked. He did that a lot, and although Qrow wanted, he never dared. And somehow Clover didn’t grow tired of offering. Just as he offered himself and his trust right now, through his firm, soft, private voice, in the cool night that they shared.

“When I started out,” he said, “I was doing lower level ops. Dust smuggling den raids. One day, I got dosed. Ever since then… I see the stuff, and I want it. Simple as that. I never broke the law. I never took any of the bricks of it we loaded up, and I always wore a hazmat through the clouds that taste like…” He bowed his head to his chest, squeezed his eyes shut, and groaned. Qrow wanted to hear him groan like that when his heart wasn’t breaking. “It was just one time, but it tasted like heaven. It was for a _second_ , and it was an accident, but I can still taste it. It was so hard to feel like that, to have the temptation in front of me. Every day. Handling it. It never got easier.” He shrugged. “So I got a transfer. Been on the headquarters security track ever since.”

“I never would have guessed. I never would have thought that was possible.”

“How come?”

“I thought you were,” Qrow hesitated. He couldn’t say it. Could he? Could he admit this? “… perfect.”

Clover smiled. “Clearly not, if you don’t want to dance with me.”

Qrow flushed. “I, uh.”

“Maybe next time, partner.” Clover turned from the rail and rested a hand on Qrow’s shoulder. “I’ve got to get back to the meeting.”

Qrow watched Clover walk back into the manor. Toward all these Schnee rooms and hallways, lined and lit with dust. So Clover felt the pangs of an addict, too. He was more than empathetic. He’d been there, and he understood. And he wanted Qrow to understand him, too.

Clover glanced back over his shoulder at Qrow and winked. Open about his interest, as always. Unapologetically himself. A stunning figure against the light. And then he disappeared.

Qrow was trying to understand this. He was trying to feel, and believe.

###

A lifetime ago, when Clover transferred out of the crime-and-drugs side of Atlas service, he took the only position that was open. It was the one that was always open: active outer patrols. It meant hunting Grimm and smoking out organized violent groups in the boreal forest, mountains, and tundra.

The work sounded brutal, but Clover had also heard other things. Something about the management. People who’d served in the place Clover was going to, the specific troop, were afraid to speak of it. He couldn’t get much more about it out of them than warnings not to trust anyone. Keep your head down, they said. Don’t be a hero. Blend into the background. Just survive. Above all, they tried to convince him not to go there.

He could have asked his father, but then his father would have wanted to know about the transfer, and Clover couldn’t explain why he had to go. Couldn’t explain why he abandoned his old team and position. Couldn’t explain what handling or looking at Dust made him feel. He had to get away from that craving, the memory of sweetness and soaring.

His first meeting with his new lieutenant started out all right. They chatted about Clover’s previous team, and the lieutenant seemed to like Clover’s experience. Still, something felt off. Something about the lieutenant’s manner felt strange. Clover wasn’t sure why. He wasn’t sure if it was only in his head. He felt like he was being evaluated anew, checked over for weaknesses. He felt like he did when he knew he was being lied to.

Maybe he shouldn’t volunteer anything.

He got out of there as quickly as he could.

###

The less said about how Clover progressively slid further and further into hell in his new position, the better. The small things. The fractured memories. The moments that bled and piled on top of each other until he couldn’t list or count them anymore. The pressure. The paranoia he’d still feel years later, and that he’d lean on James to heal.

Banned from his troop’s scheduled gym time, Clover did calisthenics outside the barracks in the freezing air. He hoped to work out some of his temper, but as he went through his reps, he got angrier and angrier. He didn’t stop and hardly noticed when the other soldiers came back. They quieted awkwardly as they filed past Clover, then started up their chatter again as they drew away.

Clover knew they didn’t mean anything by it. He understood. They were protecting themselves. But he still hated them, almost more than he hated the lieutenant.

This wasn’t the service he thought he signed up for. How could these conditions exist in the Atlas military-police complex, when he’d just come from a unit that treated him fairly? Why was this allowed to continue? He gritted his teeth and seethed. He’d probably never even find out who he could report his treatment to, and if he did, nothing would be done.

He could see the bullshit now. He was buried in it.

One large shadow lingered over Clover as he finished his routine. Biting back a groan, he pulled one leg forward to kneel and looked up. If this was the lieutenant bringing fresh hell, Clover’s luck might have finally run out on him.

Another soldier in arctic camouflage fatigues stood there with his hands clasped behind his back. He was unusually tall and broad, with dark hair and a full goatee. He looked about thirty-five to Clover’s twenty-eight, and although he wasn’t most people’s idea of handsome, he had a certain gravitas.

Clover coughed. “Sir?” he tried. “Are you an officer?”

“No.” The soldier smiled. It softened his severe, dignified face as he knelt down and offered Clover his hand. “My name is Corporal James Ironwood. I’m an enlisted, non supervisor, Huntsman graduate. I’m fireable, too, since I just transferred from the joint and foreign service track.”

“Are you sure you want to be seen talking to me?”

“I believe in judging people by their friends, and by their enemies. I want to be your friend. And if that gets me an enemy, I’ll be proud of that, too.” His eyes focused abruptly over Clover’s shoulder, and all softness faded from his face.

Clover glanced back, and he wished he hadn’t.

The lieutenant was watching them from across the clearing.

Clover had never felt such a powerful sensation of evil. Not from the dust dealers, not from the killers, never before this moment.

Like a veil being ripped away, like a house falling down, he understood. He used to think evil was a cheap concept. But he saw now that had been short-sighted. He believed in altruism, after all. Why not its opposite? Just as there were people in the world who would go out of their way to help others at great cost and no chance of reward for themselves, there were also people who would go out of their way to hurt others, even when they had nothing to gain by it and at great risk to themselves. He didn’t know what to do with that realization while it had him pinned down under its thumb. He felt like he could never get away.

“Take my hand,” said James.

Clover wrenched his head forward again. The broad hand was still extended to him. He looked James in the eye and asked, “Aren’t you afraid?”

“Of course I am,” said James. “This job is everything to me. But I’m more afraid that if I protect myself now, I’ll regret it forever.”

The evil was too much. The frustration was too much. The impotence of the system that was supposed to be better than the lieutenant was too much. So Clover took James’s hand and let the other man raise them up together, with a strong grip and a steadiness flowing from him into Clover’s body.

“Would you mind spotting me at the gym?” James said.

What? “You mean now?” Didn’t the whole group just come from training there?

“Sure. You look like you can handle what I like to bench. Fair warning, it’s not a formality spotting me. When I have someone I trust, I push until I fail. I’ve really missed doing that.”

From that day on, James stuck by him. They ate together, they went to the gym, they reassembled Clover’s bunk when the lieutenant tossed it twice a day. They sprawled out on the floor and laughed afterwards, throwing rags that bled boot polish at each other until they had to clean up all over again.

That day James reached out his hand, the first time they worked out and went to the showers, Clover hesitated. He wondered if James’s support only went so deep, and if he had hidden reservations of Clover. Of a gay man being around him or seeing him change clothes, or other political touch points like that. But James—energetic and glowing, buzzing with more energy than before he pushed himself on the weights harder than anyone Clover had ever seen—stripped off his shirt as soon as they got in the locker room, faster than Clover could think to look away, while they were still talking. Then James snagged two towels and threw one to a stunned Clover before flipping the switch to get the hot water started in the group bay. When Clover still hesitated, James threw another rolled up towel at him—then another. They got into a full on towel war and were still laughing when they ran out of rolls to throw and had to pick them all up, trying to find two that hadn’t made contact with the forever-suspect floor. By the time they did that, the hot water had run and gone, and the shower Clover had briefly worried would be tense ended up simply being cold, and easygoing, and hilarious, both of them cursing and cracking up all over again.

There was no tension, no pressure, nothing that couldn’t be said. It felt incredible to Clover, like he could breathe again.

As they walked back to the barracks that night, Clover said, “James, I’m grateful, but you don’t have to do this.”

“I want to,” said James. “And anyway, I’d be next. The lieutenant’s been noticing I don’t talk about women. That’s enough evidence for him.”

“He thinks you’re gay, like me?” It felt good to just say it.

“I’ve let him think it just to piss him off. Us running around like this will make him sure of it. But I’m not interested in anyone that way.” He shook his head. “I don’t know what I am. I’ve never met anyone else like me.”

“Maybe,” said Clover, “or maybe you have, and it didn’t come up.”

“People don’t take it well when it does come up.”

“Well, I think that’s a shame,” said Clover.

And he almost said more. He almost told James he was raised by a man who’d said some of the same things with the same distance in his eyes. Dad talked about it, but Clover had been young and focused on himself. He felt a pang of regret. A son ought to know these things. He hoped it wasn’t too late. He and Dad hadn’t been on the best of terms since Clover enlisted. Clover hadn’t even called him since he took this new assignment—or, truly, since he got dosed with Dust.

Did Dad feel as alone as James did about who he was? Surely not. Dad ran the diversity committee. Wouldn’t he be open, be proud about it, like he was with everything? Were these things that easy to miss when you weren’t listening?

He almost told James. But there are some things you don’t do in the pride community, and outing people who might not want you to is one of them. Even to make someone else like them feel better.

There would be time. Surely there would be a good time.

And for the first time since his nightmare on this base began, Clover realized, he was thinking about something _after_ the mess he was in, all because he and James were now in it together.

###

“Ironwood!” yelled the lieutenant. “That was sloppy! Give me ten laps!”

Clover winced. He could see the training field from the roof of the building where he’d climbed to follow most of what the other soldiers did. He saw James duck his head and start running.

James started taking punishment immediately after the lieutenant saw him reach out his hand to Clover. The older man accepted it without complaint, in grim determination. He hadn’t been banned like Clover was from group drill, training, and exercise, but he did get put through the wringer and singled out for made up missteps.

Something flashed across James’s skin as he rounded the field’s worst bend. The something was steel blue veined with silver. Clover blinked, wondering if that was the light, or sweat—but no. He knew what he saw. Was that James’s aura? Was it breaking? Could physical exertion alone cause that?

But James seemed to be picking up speed. He was grinning now, charging like a freight train.

The lieutenant was fuming. “Do you think this is funny, Ironwood?”

“No, sir, lieutenant, sir!” James actually looked like he was enjoying himself.

“Ten more laps!”

“Yes, sir, lieutenant, sir!”

James was unstoppable. Finally, the lieutenant gave up and ordered him to fall back in line, then sent everyone off the field.

Clover met James on the ground as soon as the lieutenant was out of sight. James’s body was gleaming, his goatee soaked with sweat and his clothes drenched and turning to sheets of ice, but he seemed to be in a very good mood. There was a twinkle in his eye as he clapped Clover on the shoulder, turned him around, and started walking with him toward the gym like he meant to push himself to his limits there, too.

“James,” Clover hissed. “It’s okay. We can skip today. You’ve got to be hurt. I saw your aura. What happened out there? Did it break?”

“Oh. No.” James glanced around them. “Keep this to yourself. People around here think I haven’t unlocked my semblance. I want to keep it that way.”

“Oh. So when you…”

“For lack of a better word, it’s sacrifice. It’s specific, but when the conditions are met, it’s powerful.”

“Conditions… like?”

“Pain. Injury. Stress. Fatigue. For a purpose. When I choose it.” James hesitated. “I’d rather not say more. I don’t have a healthy relationship with it. As for the effect, my aura doesn’t recharge, exactly, but I get another kind of energy to use how I like. It can make me stronger—that’s easiest—but it’s quite flexible. I’m building a weapon that can store and fire it as bullets, actually.” He chuckled and ran a hand through his sweat-soaked hair. “Also, it’s quite intuitive. It can have a mind of its own if I’m not prepared and grab it right away.”

“Wow. You’re like a born public servant.”

“I prefer _made_. Through my choices, every day.” James looked at him with unusual vulnerability. “Please don’t say a word to anyone. I don’t want to be used for it.”

“I understand,” said Clover. “I worry about the same thing. Your secret is safe with me.”

They went to the gym. James really threw himself into it. He went straight for the punching bags and kept knocking them off their chains. They didn’t do anything that required spotting, but Clover felt an odd urge to keep an eye on him anyway. At a certain point, when Clover was walking between machines, he glanced over and saw blood pouring from James’s knuckles. He ran over and seized James’s arms. “Hey, enough!”

The euphoria that suffused James earlier had faded. Instead, his teeth were bared in a grimace. He struggled against Clover, but his arms must have had too little fight left. He ended up leaning on Clover, gasping.

“Hey,” Clover tried to ease him down, “James—”

_“IT’S NOT RIGHT!”_

The shock of James’s gigantic shout vibrated through them both. Clover froze. Then he let himself and James both fall the last few inches to the mat.

“When you give your life to something like this,” whispered James. “When you trust them to use you for something that’s right...”

“I know,” said Clover.

“It shouldn’t be like this. Someone should be able to help. It has to be someone’s job to fix this. I want to, but I have no power. I can’t… There’s just _nothing._ All I can do is bleed.”

And he was bleeding. The mat around them was already slick with splatters from James’s hands. It was setting into Clover’s workout clothes, soaking in where James leaned on him.

“I’m so sorry,” said James. “I know this didn’t help. Please tell me what I can do for you.”

“Can we do something for you? Maybe get you cleaned up?”

“Right.” James drew back. “Sorry about your shirt.”

Clover stayed him with a hand on his arm. “Hey. Wait a minute.” He leaned forward and wrapped James in a real hug, over both their ruined clothes, in the overcirculated gymnasium air and through the fatigue setting into him. “I’m glad you’re here with me.”

James seemed shocked for a moment. Then he relaxed and circled his arms around Clover. It was clear he was being careful, maybe futilely trying to salvage their shirts, maybe conscious of his own strength. There was something uniquely comforting about hugging him, and it took Clover a minute to figure out what it was.

He’d never been this physically intimate with someone he wasn’t attracted to, and who he knew for certain couldn’t be attracted to him. He’d never had someone like that who also wanted this, and there was something so freeing about the lack of uncertainty. He didn’t have to second guess or worry. Was it like this for James, too? Had he ever had this with someone who knew about him, and who he knew wouldn’t take it in ways he didn’t intend—wouldn’t press him for more, wouldn’t withdraw when he wouldn’t give that? Had he looked for this but been hurt before?

They probably called him heartless.

Clover tightened his hold and squeezed hard, burying his head in James’s shoulder. “You’ve got the biggest heart,” he whispered, “you know that?”

James stilled. As though he remembered a moment like Clover imagined. “You’d be the first to say it.”

“I mean it.”

Nobody had ever gone so far out of their way to be a friend to Clover like James did.


	2. Always Be There

There was a day when it got worse. There was a bad mission.

The lieutenant ordered Clover to make a supply run in a blizzard. He would have to drive an armored truck to a camp on the front lines that was acting as a staging point. The whole way would be crawling with Grimm, brigands, and insurgents. They knew for a fact there were at least two well funded cells that conducted raids on the route recently. The lieutenant could fire Clover if he didn’t do it. So Clover suited up, packed the truck, and turned toward the driver side door.

James stood in his way with snow dusting his black hair and a duffel bag on his shoulder.

“James, no,” said Clover.

“You’re not going out there alone.”

“He’ll find out. He’ll fire you. And that’s if we even make it back.”

“I know.” James looked at him then the way he had on the day they met.

“James,” pleaded Clover. “Look out the window. Look at the heat map. You don’t have to go down, too.”

“You’re not going down,” said James. “I’m here to protect you. Nothing will stop me.”

And, well, that was it. When James made up his mind, he was like one of his namesake ironwood trees, with a stubbornness greater than stone, ready to break before he’d bend.

The worst of it was that Clover didn’t even want to stop him. He felt guilty that he felt so grateful.

James drove the truck while Clover watched for threats. They relied completely on their instruments, and mostly on infrared overlays across the windows, since the storm quickly worsened to a complete whiteout. Clover didn’t like it. Some species of Grimm had their ways of hiding from modern technology, and criminals certainly could. He had a feeling only his luck semblance protected them so far from hitting any signal jammers. It was impossible to tell how much time passed without looking at the clock—and, every time Clover did, he would discover an unreal span of time had been sucked from them like the breath of anything unfortunate enough to be alive and unable to outrun the wind that rocked their truck on the road.

“James,” Clover said, “it’s been ten hours.” He rubbed his eyes with the heel of his hand.

“Has it?” James sounded strangely content. There was a subtle smile in his voice. When Clover looked over, he saw the veins in James’s neck glowing a deep blue shot through with electric ice. His eyes were full of it, an almost starry light.

“James, we should take a break,” said Clover. “Maybe…” The day, the constant vigilance, it was hitting him all at once, and he was having some trouble getting his focus back. “I can drive for a while, and you can grab a few winks, and then we can switch after a couple hours.”

“I’m all right.” James sounded better than all right. Which, Clover had learned by now, meant he definitely wasn’t. He was high on his semblance, which seemed to work at times like adrenaline and other times like a runner’s rush, or like post-workout peaceful relaxation somehow inside the workout itself. Clover could see it in him, in the way he was soaking in a pleasant fog. A fear rose up in him for James, but also for both of them, for the depth of the danger they’d been plunged into, and the magnitude of the risk they faced if James’s semblance truly rewarded him for volunteering for it this much.

“James,” Clover whispered, and something of his alarm must have escaped, because James glanced at him and slowed down the truck. He finally stopped it, and he reached over and squeezed Clover’s shoulder.

“We can’t stop long,” said James, “or we’ll freeze to the ground. Put your seat down and crawl through to the back. I know you can sleep up here, but if the screen’s in front of you, you’ll keep peeking at it. I’d do the same.”

Clover would much rather James take a break first, but he honestly doubted if he could safely drive. “Thanks,” he said. “Wake me in two hours. No longer than that, all right?”

James raised an eyebrow. The lightning gleamed bright in his eyes. He rolled up his sleeve to show his watch, set an alarm, and showed it to Clover. “Happy?”

“Very,” said Clover. He unbuckled himself, flattened his seat, crawled to the back, put his head down on their bags, and slept.

When he opened his eyes, the world was oddly quiet, and he could see light. The truck wasn’t moving. He jolted up and scrambled to the seats in front.

James was there, snoring softly. In front of him, through the wide windshield, Clover saw they’d reached their destination. They were parked in a row of other trucks at the forward staging point—which was little more than a collection of metal tube shelters behind a low gate set up across the road. Far ahead loomed the mountains, where the mouth of a cave was on fire.

“James,” hissed Clover. “You were supposed to wake me up.”

“Mm,” James grumbled. He rolled his head toward Clover and peeked open one eye. His semblance had faded, leaving only the ordinary shine in their deep military blue. “We were only an hour away. I checked us in.”

Clover shook his head. “I can’t believe we made it. Look at that. The storm’s even passed.” He settled more comfortably in the passenger side seat. “Although…” He glanced around the camp. “It seems pretty dead.”

James waved vaguely at the windshield, toward the fire in the distance. “They might be on an operation. I doubt the lieutenant would have told you that kind of relevant information before we left, so it’s entirely possible.”

That blaze in the distance looked like a dragon on the mountainside. It must have been a mine. Clover knew Atlas had economic interests here, something about rare minerals. Sometimes that was code for dust veins—which was sometimes also code for mutual backscratching between the council and the Schnees. The giants of industry, Clover thought; can’t live with them, can’t live without them.

“I don’t know if that was there last night,” said James. “We were still in a whiteout when I closed my eyes—”

“—about two seconds after you parked?” When James came down, he came down hard.

James smiled. “You know me well.”

They got out and walked down the line of vehicles. A clump of contractors milled near the nearest metal shelter, smoking and gossiping. They directed Clover and James to another shelter with a wide mouth, wide enough to drive the truck into. It was a nearly empty warehouse with a crew of bored support staff who grudgingly admitted they were expecting a resupply. Clover and James went back for the truck and were driving it the last hundred feet toward the wide, wide, gaping entrance to the supply point warehouse when a dull globe of metal fell from the sky and blew up the whole place right in front of them like it was a cheap tin can.

The shock wave rippled out fast. Clover punched a button on the dash to lock down their truck, and armor slammed into place across the windshield, leaving them as blind as they’d been in the blizzard. He checked his harness next.

His hands landed not on metal and mesh, but on skin. James’s hands. Checking him. Yanking a strap tighter. Clover looked up and found James looking at him with an openness and an expression Clover had seen only once before—when Clover had looked back over his shoulder as he got on his plane to go to basic training. Clover’s father had been standing at the front of the crowd on the tarmac, a step apart, looking lost and helpless and with his eyes shining, and in the moment before the doors slammed shut, Clover wanted to take everything back and run down and hug him, and say he was sorry.

Then it hit.

The truck rocked. Not as badly as Clover thought it would, but still hard enough that he felt the vibrations and grinds of the spiked treads digging in. Atlas technology, Clover thought, in a strange and almost out of body way. Then a series of smaller shocks, from all around, from other shells that must be falling.

“What’s in the back?” said James. “What’s in those boxes?”

“I don’t know,” said Clover, “but it’s got V-1 warning.”

James cursed. “We have to get out.”

He was right. They couldn’t sit around and wait for a direct hit. The shelters outside didn’t look worth anything, but right now, their truck was worse—as good as another bomb.

They threw themselves out on the ground. By sheer dumb luck, they landed just as another boom rang out, and debris skimmed Clover’s head. He met James’s eyes ten feet away under the carriage of the vehicle, but before they could do anything else, _another_ shockwave and boom tore through them. Clover heard metal _rip_ , and one of the truck’s cargo doors flew off and blew down the road like a sheet of paper. Again, like an observer, Clover thought: it must have given at the hinges.

Another boom. A crate dropped off the truck. It split open—

And dust canisters rolled out.

Clover’s vision tunneled. They were all he could see. Brilliant red and green. Soft cream and yellow. Cyan and purple and neon everything. He could crush them in his fist. It would be so easy. He smelled it already, like fermenting vanilla beans with an edge of rot.

“Clover?” said James, but his voice came to Clover as if through water. He was kneeling close, offering his hand. That registered. Clover grabbed onto him, and James dragged him up and out of the street to crouch between two tin shelters.

“Dust canisters,” whispered Clover. “What are they _doing_ up here?” He turned his head away from the way they had come and focused on James.

James, loading his standard sidearm, shook his head. “I don’t know. It explains the cave up on the mountain. Some of our special project formulas burn like Arkos fire. Of course, everyone wants a piece of that. Using it in the open could have drawn this attack.”

“We’ve got to get through this,” said Clover. “If they take the… what we brought, who knows where it’ll turn up.” Visions flashed through his head of his home, his and his father’s fishing cabin, and oddly enough his and James’s spot in the barracks, all in flames. National security could feel pretty distant until the last second before everything you loved _in_ that nation potentially went to shit.

The shelling went on and on, and then it stopped. Then they heard crashing and shouts and gunshots from the edge of the facility.

Clover and James looked at each other. Without a word, they ran towards the fight.

James’s body flashed once with a light like blue steel.

Atlas forces had been pinned down by guerilla fighters, so Clover and James joined their comrades in cover. They shot. They got shot at. This went on for a while. It was impossible to tell, most of the time, whether they hit anything. Finally, it was quiet, and Clover started to think maybe they got all the enemy, or at least absorbed all their ammunition. He started to suggest as much to James, next to him. It was really good to have James here. Clover loved him, he really did, and he thought now might be a good time to tell him again.

That was when a grenade landed at their feet.

They both dove to cover it.

James got there first.

###

By a stroke of extraordinary good luck, the blast only took half of James’s body. The half that remained was the left—the side Clover landed on top of and had been in contact with when the grenade went off.

The moments after the explosion for Clover were a blur of concussed perceptions, trying to figure out where he was, where James was, and which way was up. He tried to figure out which parts of what he found were alive. He wanted to throw up but was too confused to actually do it, and all he could think was—again—he couldn’t find a spot around where he fell that he felt comfortable saying wasn’t part of James. Clover wasn’t sure how long he crawled around like that before the medics strapped him into a remote surgery pod right next to James. He learned later they judged it better to be safe than sorry in case any of the blood was his.

Atlas technology was amazing. Still, Clover would never have thought it was possible for anyone to come back from an injury like James suffered. Clover reached out and let his unbandaged hand hover over the shining metal that joined James’s right collarbone. He passed his hand down like a scanner, feeling the faint warmth radiating over the sheets. The prosthetics weren’t cold, at least. Not completely. But they would be heavy. The doctors even had to replace most of James’s vital organs. Clover retreated back as far as he could shrink in his chair, overwhelmed by a welling of guilt.

James had supported Clover. He was there for him. He did what was right. And now he’d have to live like this.

James groaned.

Clover snapped his eyes back to James’s face.

James’s eye peeked open like it had in the truck, like it had where they were when they should have turned back. They should have thrown the crates out the door and hauled ass, taken their chances alone on their way back through the tundra, so clear and clean after the storm. “How long?”

“I… I don’t know.”

“You’re hurt. What happened?”

“You saved me. Gods, James, I’m so sorry.”

“No…” James’s face twisted in pain. “You… you were supposed to get away. Why’d you have to…” He tried to sit up, but he spasmed, gasping.

Clover jumped forward to hold him down—then recoiled just as quick when the slightest start of pressure made James scream. He held his breath while James gritted his teeth and breathed deep, loud, and hard through his nose. His blue eyes, squeezed shut, finally opened. Tears shone in them. The sight called Clover back to awareness of himself, and he realized he, too, was crying.

“I didn’t want to wake up,” said James.

“What?” said Clover.

“I don’t want to live. I can’t take it.”

“James, please don’t say that.”

“I’ve never told anyone.”

“I need you here with me.” Clover reached out again, more carefully. “I… I wish I didn’t get you hurt like this. You were only there because of me. Now you’ll have to live the rest of your life with…”

“With what?” James grimaced. “Gods, this hurts.” For the first time, he took some care and managed to lift his head up. He looked down at himself, and his eyes focused on his new metal arm between himself and Clover. “What…”

“You lost half your body,” said Clover. “New right arm and leg, and your side. I think they did something with your lung. I’m sorry, I just stopped understanding what they said after a while, when they came and told me they put something else in, when you were on the table. They still thought you were going to die, pretty much up to the end.”

“Hm.” James squinted down at his new hand. The fingers twitched.

“They say it’ll take some time to get used to. Hey, don’t make faces. There’s an implant in your temple—”

“So that’s what keeps pulling. On my face, too?”

Again with that odd expression. That odd tone. Clover fought down panic and nodded.

“Hm,” said James again. “I couldn’t tell. It must be the painkillers. I’m not smiling like a fool, am I?”

“No,” Clover scoffed, almost with relief, but he didn’t know if he liked that James was already joking. Painkillers, sure, but he seemed lucid enough. “James. Come on. It’s okay to, I don’t know. I mean. I’m freaking out a little here because you, well, you aren’t.”

“That does sound like what I’m supposed to do,” said James.

Clover was still trying to read him when a knock came at the recovery room’s door. Thinking it was a doctor, Clover called, “Come in.”

And in came Clover’s father, pilot’s helmet tucked under his arm, looking like he’d buried half the world in paper and wasn’t finished yet.

###

James wasn’t sure what Clover and the older man who looked so much like him talked about in the hallway. He could only hear their muffled voices. After a while, they came back in, and the stranger looked down at James.

“Dad, this is James,” said Clover. “Corporal James Ironwood. Like I said, he saved my life. James, this is my father, Staff Sergeant Felix Ebi,” and he hesitated, glancing at Felix, “M.O.H.”

Of course. _That_ Felix Ebi. The Felix Ebi who was the sole survivor of a drawn out effort over a decade ago to retake a large mine that had been overrun by Grimm. He tried to decline his Medal of Honor and ended up stealing the microphone at the ceremony. He told off the executive—Cordova? Cordoban?—who pinned the medal to his coat. He accused her of sacrificing his friends for her career. It was televised, and at the end of it, Felix shunned all further press and disappeared into the bureaucracy. So did the executive, although less gracefully; she got sent to a backwater post meant to make her retire, but where she still stubbornly seethed, clinging to an image of herself as a champion of Atlas.

“It’s an honor, sir,” said James. 

“It’s a reminder,” said Felix.

A reminder. James flexed his new prosthetic fingers. His story was different, but that word—it helped him understand how he felt about what he woke up with after what happened to him. Part of his body had become a reminder.

“Thank you for saving my son,” said Felix. “Thank you for being there with him. I know what it’s like to survive because someone else makes the ultimate sacrifice, so I’d also like to thank you for living. Don’t worry about a thing while you’re recovering here. I’m handling your former lieutenant. I’ll be flying off to the city soon. Do you want me to come back with your family?”

“Family?” said James. “Ah. No. Thank you.” It was a little hard to tell, because it was a little hard to see, but he thought Clover was looking at him and wondering. “Please. Don’t tell them anything.”

“Got it,” said Felix. “I’ll just come back with lunch sometime.” He saluted, and then walked out the door.

Felix and Clover were in and out of James’s room after that, sometimes together, sometimes separate. Sometimes he woke up and heard them talking, but as soon as he shifted, they hushed. He probably could have faked sleeping, but even before they noticed him, he instinctively didn’t let himself listen in, and the painkillers made it easy for him to let nearly anything fade and fuzz.

###

_“They’ll probably buy you off,” said Felix. “Just take the promotion, and don’t say anything. Don’t do what I did.”_

_“Dad—”_

_“That goes for both of you,” said Felix. “I’m your father, so let me help you for once. You didn’t trust me enough to do something else with your life, you didn’t trust me enough to talk to me—”_

_“We couldn’t!”_

_“When’s the last time you called? You didn’t even tell me you transferred out here.”_

_“I…” Clover stopped. He looked away. “I couldn’t.”_

_“I don’t know what’s been going on with you, but you could have died. So trust someone, and figure it out." Felix opened his mouth to keep going, and then suddenly stopped. He sighed, and the rigidity in his form relaxed. He shifted the pilot’s helmet still tucked under his arm. “Okay, actually, let me try this again. I’m sorry about the way I said all that. I’m angry right now because you scared me. I just want you to talk to me.”_

_“I know, Dad. I promise, I will.”_

_“Okay. That’s fair. I just want you to remember—you don’t have to do everything by yourself.”_

###

Eventually, perhaps the next day, James woke up, and he saw Clover sitting next to him. Clover had his head buried in his hands. He wasn’t crying, or shaking, or showing any upset in his breathing. That was somehow worse than if he had been.

“Clover?” said James.

“Can you tell me,” said Clover. He didn’t sound angry. He just sounded tired.

“Tell you what?”

“Can you tell me what it is about this job.”

“Clover, I—”

“I didn’t think it would be this bad. I thought if it was bad, I could quit. That I would want to quit. But I don’t want to quit, and I don’t understand. Are you going to quit?”

“No.”

“Okay. And are you going to _quit_?”

Now he must mean the other quit. “No. That’s about all I can manage. Not to quit.” That was the last line for him, the one he was holding. He’d make the world kill him. He was too stubborn and frustrated not to. He had to buy something he cared about with his life to make the pain and futility up to now worth anything after all.

“Then I guess it’s you and me.” Clover raised up his head. He cracked a sardonic smile.

And that was what it shaped up to be. They got word they were being promoted and brought back to headquarters proper in Atlas. It was something related to research and development, which could be code for anything. They could report whenever they were ready.

According to Felix, that could be as far in the future as they wanted, on pain of endless annoying collateral duties and deferred supply requests for anyone who made an issue of it. Felix seemed to have internal pull despite his public reticence, and he seemed constantly on the verge of saying more than he did.

James ended up never asking about what the old soldier was holding back. He felt they had something in common, and found himself speculating on it, but he was afraid to be proven wrong. So he confined himself to imagining he’d finally met someone like him, as he so often did, and sought as little as possible further information, so as to minimize the chance his illusions would be dispelled.

###

James went through more tests and finished out physical therapy at the hospital. Normally, the surgery team would be done talking to him at this point, but the specialist who had installed most of the prosthetics kept on coming by. He was a middle-aged neurosurgeon, Dr. Hugh, friendly and balding, who smiled and sagged with relief every time he spoke to James.

James had never quite been able to either thank or curse Dr. Hugh for not giving up on saving his life. Apparently the surgery took—well, no one would tell him. But from what James could put together, Dr. Hugh’s time in the operating room had reached upwards of twenty hours. There had been multiple crisis points, multiple shifts and teams, and every time Dr. Hugh had tried to catch rest to refresh his eyes and hands, some new bleedout or complication dragged him back, and he had to make snap decisions and choose between two or more different experimental techniques. Dr. Hugh was so earnest, and the tale so impressive, that James couldn’t bring himself to actually express his frustration.

Today James was stretching, and then he was gripping a wood block with his metal hand. He sat on an aluminum chair that he couldn’t believe held his weight.

Dr. Hugh perched half on a three-legged stool nearby, watching, eyes shining, and said, “I kept things anonymous, as you said, and mixed you in with my other patients. But I think our case study on your surgery is really going to have an impact.”

James stacked the block of wood on top of another. He was getting pretty good at this. Since his conversation with Felix, he was reminded of Clover and suffused with a sense of wholeness and satisfaction in himself every time he used the new parts of his body. He liked that, so he used them as much as possible, and it seemed to be helping him acclimate.

“You should be getting help from the neural implant,” said Dr. Hugh. “I was hesitant about that. But it was a recommendation from Dr. Pietro Polendina, another specialist who works with aura integration, who I think you’ll meet when you go to research and development. Anyway, I hope you’ll let us keep following up. I’ve decided using medical data to push better protective gear standards is what I want from my life’s work.” He chuckled. “I confess, I didn’t think it would take me this long after med school to find my purpose, but now I know why. The wait was worth it.”

“Is the data really that helpful?”

“Everything we learned between your initial condition and what we knew about the blast, and your surgery—this is going to change everything about how we issue body armor, how we program remote surgery modules, how we install prosthetics. I’ve already got headquarters to sign off on new helmets for infantry. And you know the council never wants to be left out of anything, so I think we can get them shared with the civilian sector. Imagine a ninety percent decrease in motorcycle fatalities.”

James hadn’t really thought that through. Doubtless, if he’d died, that would have been equally useful to science, and still motivated Dr. Hugh. It was unfair and perplexing to still be alive. But Dr. Hugh seemed so relieved. James simply couldn’t begrudge him that.

“It was so close with you. It didn’t have to be. I’m sorry I couldn’t do better earlier.”

James didn’t want to be a survivor. He kept that to himself, however, and simply told Dr. Hugh it was all right.

James saw Clover later—he’d been waiting for James in his private room. James had been too out of it to question the accommodations when he woke up, and now he simply thought it better not to know whether the special treatment came down to pity or politics.

Clover said, “I hear you’re doing well with that.”

James rolled his right shoulder. He rested his weight on his right leg. “I suppose I am,” he said, and frowned, so that he felt the pull of the implant in his brow against his skin. “Is it strange I’m not happy about that?”

“Do you… not want to get better?” Too neutral. Too casually. Gods damn everything, James never meant to burden him. Clover should only have had to be the beneficiary of James’s sacrifice. He shouldn’t have to carry James’s reasons for it.

“I don’t know if we’ll ever get better, really.” James thought of the knot of memories behind both himself and Clover right now, and he saw the same feeling overshadow Clover’s eyes where he leaned by the window. “This is actually about what your father said. Now that I’m still alive, these parts of me have become a reminder. Of something good. I thought of that all the time when they were fresh and when they hurt worse. Now I’m afraid they’ll stop hurting at all, and I’ll be reminded of that moment less often.”

Clover rubbed at his bicep, where he had an old scar. “Just like a plain old arm and leg. I guess you didn’t spend much time before just thinking about the fact they were there.”

“It might be because the prosthetics are so advanced. But then, they say a body can get used to almost anything.”

“I’m still waiting for you to suddenly start panicking. I would. I sort of did, even though I’m the one with hardly a scratch on me. I’ve been walking it off when you’re not looking.”

“Well, there you are,” said James. “You’ve been panicking for both of us. No wonder I’m fine.”

Clover threw the chair’s cushion at him.

James caught it with his right hand and grinned.

“Nice reflexes,” said Clover.

“The therapy is a little basic.” James hesitated. “Well. Actually, it’s strange. My reflexes work better than what I try to do on purpose. That is, as long as I don’t reach for the phantom limb.”

“Is it bad?”

“Not really. It’s happening less and less often.”

James did still get some of what the doctors called phantom pains. The term didn’t really make sense to him, since it was less like pain and more like twitching in half-sleep. He’d suddenly get an urge to lurch and reach out his old hand, or kick out with his foot, and he’d feel like he was starting to do it and see it in his mind—yet only his torso or thigh would move or clench in a kind of spasm, or maybe nothing would move, and then he’d feel disoriented and have to sit down. Maybe it was painful, but not like other kinds of pain, and frankly it felt more like frustration, vertigo, or nausea.

James went over to his bed and picked up his pillow. That was all the warning Clover needed by this point in their friendship to duck. He snorted at James and picked up the pillow, then lobbed it back. James caught it and dropped it back on the bed.

(He felt a slight twinge _outside_ the metal fingers he was looking at as he dropped the pillow.)

“You okay?” said Clover.

“There’s a little pain. I do feel strange. But I don’t think I’m going to have that sudden panic.”

“I mean, you can.”

“I’m actually all right with this.” James examined his engineered hand. “The only thing that really bothered me was the fact that I survived. You know, in that moment, I really just wanted to save you. It was only after I hit the ground that I thought: thank goodness, it’s finally over.”

“James—”

“What I’m trying to say is, before that, I had this moment where I did it for the right reasons. And now that feeling can physically always be part of me.” It could remind him of what service and sacrifice were supposed to be, and who he could have been, if he never started falling into resignation and waiting to greet death like a friend. Now he had a sparkling gem in the marathon of his life that made him proud, where he had no regrets, and which merged somehow with the bond he felt with Clover. “Maybe I can… separate it out, like this. When I’ve got these. When you’re with me.” He closed his eyes. He concentrated on the places where metal joined into his body. The faint ache, and the memory of cold air and cold ground and cold metal and bizarrely a feeling of _gratitude_ when he knew he’d made it and done the right—

A hand on his flesh and blood shoulder brought him back, and he opened his eyes. Clover stood in front of him, face drawn with worry.

“It’s all right,” said James. “It’s not always all bad, going back.”

###

After a while, they decided they were ready. They walked out of the hospital and onto a plane, which Clover’s father had borrowed to take them back to the city.

It was fast after that, but all in silence and in stacks of paper that arrived by certified mail. They didn’t even get access to their new office for a couple more weeks.

They did a lot of walking, and they bought new clothes. They developed a routine they’d keep up for the rest of their lives, of times they’d meet up and how they would adjust. After work started, they kept ending up the two last to leave, lingering in the lab or in the office and then on the ramparts.

It took years before either James or Clover could trust anyone besides each other, so they talked over what they went through late into many a night.

###

“Maybe we should try,” said Clover, after a while.

“Try what?” asked James.

“Making a list of it.” Maybe then they could see how much there was. Maybe they could see if there was ever an end to it. Maybe the thing would grow to pages and pages and consume their secure drawers, like the trauma sucked in and consumed their minds and conversations. Without James, thought Clover, he didn’t know what he’d do. He could have died, if not back in that post on the frontier, then now, stewing in the memory, rotting, suffocating.

“That’s a good idea.” James bowed his head. He reached into a drawer and took out a notebook. “We need to write it down.”

They tried to do it in the order it happened, but they kept having to fill in gaps. They had to rewrite the list over and over. Piles of redrafts filled up the desk.

“Before you got there,” James would say, and squeeze in a line in the margin at the top of the page, “there was the incident with medical equipment. Someone had a reasonable accommodation filed with health services for keeping a machine in their room, but one day the lieutenant let himself in and took it and locked it away, and it took two weeks to force him to give it back to the soldier, who throughout those two weeks ran a one-oh-five fever. They could have died. I can’t prove the lieutenant was trying to kill them, but he certainly wouldn’t have cared if that was the result of harassing them.”

“Do you remember,” Clover would say, “one of the first nights after class,” and James would pass him the pen and a new sheet of paper, because they were going to have to redraft again. They’d started assigning each event its own page, and binding them in order. “We were working on that policy draft. I got pulled aside to get up early the next morning, two hours before everybody else, and meet with the next rank up. The lieutenant didn’t tell me why. When I got there, it was me and my peer review partner, who didn’t know what it was about, either. They asked us why we’d been bickering. And that was—we got on fine. They kept pressing it. We looked at each other, and I could see it: we both realized they were just trying to get us to slip up or lose our tempers or something. We just kept pretending we didn’t know what was going on, and eventually they let us out, and it was never brought up again. I didn’t have time to eat before we went out that day. I barely made it on time to my shift, and they tried to write me up for being late.”

James wrote and wrote with his metal hand, mostly handling the redrafts. Clover wrote with his left hand until he got tired, and then he switched to the right, and then eventually back again. They went in sometimes in the middle of the night. They even did it during the day, when one of them caught the other staring into space for as long as a half hour at a time.

“Nobody believes us,” whispered Clover. “They say this is normal.” He rested his hands on the sheets of paper. They wrote it on so many sheets of paper. Clover couldn’t believe sometimes how much of it there was to write. He compressed and compartmentalized it so far down, and now he was unwinding it—every time he remembered it—it came like a magician’s chain of handkerchiefs, unspooling chaotically around. James and he both exhausted themselves chopping it to pieces, sorting it clinically by date, and feeding it to their binder.

“They don’t understand,” said James. “They weren’t there. Every story sounds like it’s not too far from ordinary military hazing. But when you put it all together…”

“I got the usual wringer at basic training,” said Clover, “we all did. But that wasn’t what this felt like. This always felt off. Wrong.”

James shook his head. “Normal military hazing,” he said, “would have been him telling us to run around, to do ridiculous and irritating things, but not all of this. This was abusive. He threatened our health and our careers. And he lied about it. Normally, if the new soldier on base walked by him and he said the salute wasn’t good enough, and we had to do a hundred push-ups… yes, that would be fine. We all know there’s some purpose to that, and we pay our dues. If we complained, and there were a hearing, normal supervisors would admit it without a second thought and say that’s how things were done. But he knew he was out of line. That’s why he always lied about it.”

It felt like they wrote forever, meeting up late after work and staying up later. But finally, one day, they finished, and it was all in order.

“I think it’s done,” said Clover, half not believing it. “I think that’s everything.”

James drew his brows together and flipped to the table of contents. He ran his metal finger down the lines, checking them like the engine of a plane.

“Did we get the time,” said Clover, “when he said I had the wrong kind of water bottle and poured it out in front of me?”

“It’s here.” James flipped to the appropriate divider and turned the binder around to show him. “That was when you were still with the group. Before that was him saying your wrestling shoes weren’t gray enough because the soles had a black logo. Afterward was him accusing you of eating in the brief hall.”

“I still can’t believe that. I swallowed before I answered a question. That was it.”

They got the time the lieutenant ordered Clover to retrieve papers from the other side of the base for him five minutes before a briefing, and then punished him because that made Clover late.

They got the time base security was called to make sure Clover cleaned out his gym locker after the lieutenant decided he didn’t need one anymore. The lieutenant watched, too, and when James came down the hall—(“I don’t know what I thought I was going to do,” muttered James, “and to be frank, I thought they fired you. That’s how they do it when they kick you out: escort you and watch you pack your belongings and make sure you’re doing it fast.”)—and the lieutenant whirled and yelled at James like he was a dog, made a condescending twirling motion with one finger, and spat, “Turn around.”

They got the time when they were walking together and the lieutenant came around a corner and looked them up and down in disgust before accusing them of having sex. For a moment, Clover couldn’t speak for how angry he was. But James—though Clover knew him, and he knew the feel of James next to him growing as tense and angry as Clover was—James gave the most falsely cooperative and bureaucratic non-answers Clover had ever heard as the lieutenant grilled them. They paid for it later, but the lieutenant definitely didn’t get what he’d wanted out of that encounter.

There was, at last, a day when James set down his pen, and they agreed it was all there. They had shared and ordered everything. The weight slid off their chests and into that binder they made.

Clover wouldn’t call it letting go. He wouldn’t call it moving on. That didn’t feel right. But he did feel like the experience didn’t take up the same space inside him. It didn’t spill over the way it had before. It didn’t feel like a bundle of endless small pieces that at any moment might fall out of his hands, or that he might forget or find more of. It was less like pain, and more like the tightness and pulling of scar tissue.

###

“Was it you?” asked Clover, years later, when they stood over the grave of their old lieutenant.

“No,” said James, “but I wish it was. I actually feel robbed. I was going to disgrace him publicly. I wanted him court martialed and put in jail. I was almost ready.”

The lieutenant had been shot in the back, and as far as Clover was concerned, it couldn’t have happened to a nicer person. He supposed someone like that always had more enemies, and one finally got enough of him.

James and Clover stayed away from the investigation, but in the end, the friendly fire was ruled an accident. The investigators weren’t even sure who had done it. Clover found that a little suspect, and he thought maybe the investigation was intentionally less than diligent. Still, strictly, doggedly, he and James stayed away. They only kept talking as they always had, trying to decide if they felt any more closure, like they might finally be able to turn the page of their experience someday and not be weighed down by it ever again, after the death. At least this meant no one else was getting hurt anymore the way they had.

“Imagine living like that,” said Clover, later, sitting next to James by a window in the officers’ lounge, watching snow fall down on the city. “Imagine being that kind of person, treating so many people like that. Eventually he had so many people wanting him dead that when he got shot and they looked at motive, it could have been almost anyone.”

“That’s why I wanted him to live,” said James. “I wanted him to suffer. When I hear the words ‘hell is other people’, I think about him. He deserved his own company forever. Hell is being that kind of person, and never being able to escape yourself.”

James said it like he knew. Clover asked: “Is that what you were scared of, when we met?”

“Deciding to protect myself,” said James, “making that decision, and having to live with the regret afterward. Yes. Still, I should have done better. I chose to go under fire, but you didn’t have a choice. That must have really been hell.”

“Hell,” said Clover, “for me, was not being able to trust anyone. I could have been stuck like that forever, but you pulled me out. Listen, I’d take a court case, and I’m glad he’s in the ground. But you beat him when you gave me your hand, and I beat him when I took it.”

“What if I kept walking? The thought still scares me. I don’t know how I’d live with it.”

“I wouldn’t blame you.”

James started. He met Clover’s eyes. “Really?”

“Yeah.” Clover smiled. “I thought I blamed the others back then, but I couldn’t hold on to it. I don’t know what I would have done if I were in their shoes. Maybe I would have walked by me, too.” He turned his head to watch the window again, with the snow falling down. Up, high up was where he trained his eyes, where he always caught James trying to see past the clouds. “I wouldn’t blame you if you were stronger, or weaker, or if you were more scared, or less.”

“I,” said James, and then: “Thank you.” In side profile, out of the corner of Clover’s eye, he seemed to finally be relaxing. He turned back toward the window, too.

“I mean it,” Clover said. “I wouldn’t blame you. And you shouldn’t blame yourself.”


	3. My Soul Is Here To Stay

Clover spent a day almost entirely at his desk. He filled out every detail on the forms that kept his team stocked with everything they needed, a lot they didn’t, and more he knew would never show up but requisitioned anyway. He documented a week’s worth of patrols on the outskirts. It was hard to track in the moment, but when he looked over all his notes like this, he saw how much better he and his team were doing.

A lot of that came down to working with Qrow and the group he’d brought to Atlas.

Speaking of Qrow. Clover checked the clock that stretched across the wall to one side of him, listing the current local times in every major Atlas base and allied capital city across Remnant. They showed Clover that his work was supposed to be done.

Clover looked down at the forms still piled up, incomplete, on one side of his desk. He sighed and pushed them away. There were some days he worked overtime, maybe two or three nights a week, but he’d gotten better about curbing that impulse and taking care not to burn himself out.

It helped to schedule appointments he had to leave for. Today, at breakfast, he got Qrow to agree to let Clover show him and the kids around Atlas. After that—well, Clover supposed he had a packed evening, since today was also gym night with James. They ran into each other there more often than not, but formally, they went together once a week.

Clover strolled down to the lobby and met up with Qrow, and then they packed all the kids into one shuttle that creaked as it lifted off from the dock. Qrow jumped and glanced out the window worriedly, but Clover nudged him and joked about how old the thing probably was, and its likely former life as a food truck. Soon enough, Qrow seemed to forget his fear that he’d bring the ship down all by himself. Never mind they jumped from this height all the time; Clover understood there wasn’t a lot of logic to these things.

Over the horizon, past Atlas’s walls, the tundra shone and called back memories. Dots in the mountainside, maybe hiding fire. How many Grimm and artillery shells were lining up for battle in the evergreens leading up to the glacier? How many between here and his family’s fishing lodge?

Qrow nudged him. “Hey. Where’d you go?”

Clover shook his head. He turned away from the window. “Nowhere I’m supposed to be,” he said. He offered Qrow an apologetic smile. “I’m not getting paid to be there right now. It’s just hard to turn it off.”

“It’s okay if you want to go back and… forget tonight.”

“No. This is good. It helps.”

“I get what you mean.”

“Yeah?”

“The… Hard to turn it off.” Qrow struggled with the words, then shrugged. “The kids help me.”

The shuttle touched down, creaking again, but everybody was up and talking and scrambling around. Of all people, Oscar half tripped, half ran by, and nearly knocked Clover and Qrow off their feet.

“So,” said Qrow, as he stepped warily down off the ship, “where are we going?”

Clover took the hand Qrow offered him on the way down. He didn’t take too much advantage of it, but he exchanged a look and smile with Qrow afterward before he let go. Yeah, pretty soon, Clover wanted to have that conversation with him, about whether Qrow wanted to do anything else with the spark and the glow Clover felt constantly called up by Qrow in him.

Clover took them around some of the places any tourist would expect, but he mixed in gems only locals knew about, and he tried to give everyone in the group at least one spot that spoke personally to them. The happy, energetic types seemed to like everything, and Clover was glad they lit up at what he picked for them—but he felt a special pride at helping quieter or more reserved young people feel like they’d been a priority.

Ren got a stop at a water and stone garden where a local sculptor was holding a pop-up installation of crystal flower art, and where local musicians were playing a gentle set. Blake opened her body language and let herself flow and take up space through the street dedicated to theatre, costumery, blacksmithing, zine cubbies, and activism billboards. Oscar liked the community garden and farmers’ market; for a moment, he looked at home, kneeling automatically into loam and sprinkling grain for the ranging chickens. Weiss got surprisingly into the street show where a magician made effects with colored powders; when a volunteer was called for, she raised her hand, and she smiled as smoke wove into the shapes of vibrant animals around her.

At one point or another, all these places had been good memories for Clover, and he loved seeing the next generation discover and appreciate them.

Clover finally dropped the group off at a diner where they could burn off the last of their energy—and Qrow could put his feet up—while Clover went back up to the base. Everything was running on schedule, until Clover’s shuttle got delayed. He cursed and texted James that he’d be late on his way back from the outing with Qrow. No answer. Well, no problem. Clover fought against an unexplainable, surging sense of worry.

Half an hour late, he walked into the gym. The first thing he saw was James pinned beneath a bar at the bench press, struggling and groaning and already drenched with sweat as he fought but couldn’t lift it off his lungs.

Clover sprinted to him and seized the bar. They wrestled it up onto the hitch together. It was so heavy. James wasn’t supposed to lift this much. The moment they got the weight secured, Clover sagged down, braced himself on the bench by James’s head, and panted, “You okay?”

James groaned. “Not really.”

“What were you thinking?”

“That you weren’t coming.”

“Did you get my text?”

“Yes.”

“Damn it, James.” Clover clenched and relaxed his hands, and then he struggled up. He checked James over. He prodded at James’s joints, asked some sharp and pointed questions. It seemed like they got lucky. James hadn’t hurt himself beyond the level of pulls, bruises, and jams. Rest would do. Maybe a week. “Next week we’re doing movie night instead of gym night. No argument.”

James turned his head so Clover couldn’t see his eyes. “And what’ll we watch?” he asked quietly. “You know I’ve nearly given up. Why bother reading or watching anything? No one wants a story about people like me.”

“I’ll find something, okay? I know it’s my turn. You always find something for me.” Clover sighed and twisted his fingers in James’s shirt. He jerked the loose fabric without any real force, simply drawing it taut, for attention. “Is that what this is about? That and my text?”

James didn’t answer.

“You’ve got nothing to worry about,” said Clover. “It’s out there. And I’m right here. Come on, let’s get you off the damn bench. If you can’t walk, I get to be Acting General.”

“Don’t tempt me,” said James. He groaned and sat up with Clover’s guiding hands on his back and right shoulder. “You know, for all your threats, you’re actually quite professional when you’re Acting.”

“This time, I mean it: every day will be team jersey day. Pets allowed in the office. Memes will be an authorized form of intelligence report.”

“Just run for the council on that platform and have done with it.”

“That’s the only job I want less than yours.”

Clover badgered James through a set of stretches. He made James stop every time he thought he saw a wince of pain, checking him over again. Surprisingly, James didn’t wave him off. When Clover was satisfied with his physical condition, they wiped down the bench press. Then they sat down on the mat, resting their collections of old injuries against one wall where the paint was chipping. Periodically, the motion sensing lights would flicker off, and they’d have to wave their arms around until the antiquated sensors registered they were people again.

“James,” said Clover, “I feel like you’ve been pulling away from me.”

James sat still, with his great brow tilted down, watching the blank mat ahead of them as though it were a pool of still water.

“You’ve been different this last month, since Qrow came back. I thought it was because of your relationship with him.”

“I meant it when I said I was glad to see him.”

“I know. I think you’re doing okay as far as that goes. So I’m starting to think you getting reckless tonight might be about _my_ relationship with Qrow instead.”

“It’s fine. I told you.”

“James, I’ve been late to gym night before.”

“I told you it’s—”

“I’ve been late because of meetings, because of missions, because of traffic. But this time when I was late after I was with Qrow, you started without me and hurt yourself. I know something’s bothering you.”

“You’ll forget about me,” said James. No hesitation, no emotion. Like it was just a fact to him as he kept his eyes fixed ahead and down. He didn’t react when the lights flickered off, but somehow he looked more washed out after Clover brought them clicking back on with an impatient wave.

Clover sighed. He thumped his head back against the wall. “No, I won’t.”

“You won’t mean to. It’s all right.”

“I won’t. Look. You’ve seen what happens to people around here when they stop doing anything without their S.O. They don’t stay together. It doesn’t work.”

“Hm,” James conceded.

“I’m going to _need_ time away from him. And I’m always going to need you.”

James didn’t look convinced. He never really did, when they talked about this. However, he didn’t argue further. In terms of progress, that was about all Clover could ask.

For tonight, at least.

Clover believed in a James who knew how to believe. It would be hard, but he knew they’d get there.

James ran a speech by Clover once, a speech he never ended up giving. There was a line about doing things not because they were easy, but because they were hard, and a genuine emotional push to convey James’s ambitions for peacetime space missions.

Clover thought a lot about how James looked then, how he sounded, and wondered where that side of him had come from, and how it had gotten so deeply locked away. He couldn’t shake an image of James as a child, maybe looking up at the sky and turning over the seeds of a dream.

###

James finished out his last day of work for the week, signed off his computers, and walked automatically to the gym. It wasn’t until he got to the door and felt the twinge in his chest as he reached for the keypad that he remembered Clover’s words to him were still in effect.

No more gym time for James for the week. Nothing to do with this awful energy that bounced around inside him.

Except that there were outlets for him, an almost endless number. He made himself remember and go through the list. What had he built his custom sidearm, Due Process, for, if not to give himself more choice when channeling his semblance?

He had to admit it now. He had to admit it, if he wanted to get better and be the person who could protect his friends in this important time: he chose to do what would hurt him, even when he had other options. He even convinced himself sometimes there were no other options. He saw only an unbroken road he had to bulldoze his way through.

And he wallowed. He was bad about that.

Clover’d convinced him to try therapy, and it was helping. It had helped in recognizing some of these tendencies in himself. James just hadn’t had time to go, lately.

He walked away from the gym and went to the range, burning through bullets like blue comets which he loaded from his restless soul until the chamber clicked empty.

The range had no windows. The lanes were separated from each other at the firing positions by walls. The steel ceiling was opaque over him, with hanging, flickering electric bulbs.

The strangest thing about his service, even in the bleakest of places, was that he could always feel the mission. And he still had his old ridiculous dreams. He’d gone so far as to bet the fate of the world on them, lately.

Maybe it was true that a war could be won by a choice for hope and connection.

Maybe he was more than a game piece.

Maybe he hadn’t only been dreaming, when he used to look up at the sky. When looking up had been his only escape. The window and the blue and the stars.

He went out in the courtyard and looked at it for a while again, before he went to sleep.

###

Penny loved Mantle, and she loved Atlas, but she also loved the countryside and the people who lived there.

She touched down on the hillside near a snow-dusted longhouse as the sun was going down. She could see rows of fires inside, and people cooking and talking across them. Outside, too, was bustling, as the indigenous shepherdesses of the Thyme clan brought their flocks home for the night. Sometimes they would stay in the bluffs for weeks, but for reasons Penny wasn’t completely clear on, they’d been pulling back close to their longhouse and holding meetings every night. Even the tribal citizens who normally lived in the city were setting up here across fires from their extended family.

Fiona Thyme was just running in from the hills with two dogs driving her flock behind her. She used a stout corgi and a large pointy-eared heeler. The corgi was barking energetically at a lamb that had tried to stray off on its own, while the heeler was actually hopping up on the backs of the sheep and running across the close-packed herd in precise lines—surprising the sheep into splitting into groups that flowed to different pens. Fiona walked between the pens’ gates and eventually swung them closed. The dogs sat until Fiona pointed at the longhouse entry, sending them inside.

“Salutations, Fiona!” Penny called, and swept an elaborate curtsy.

“Penny! Hey, there.” Fiona smiled. She wiped her hands on her tunic and leaned against the fence. “I’m glad you could make it. Grandma says sorry, though. She’s not done with your dress.”

Penny walked forward. She saluted for good measure and clasped her hands in front of her. “That’s all right, Fiona. Ah. What dress?”

“You know how she is.” Fiona giggled and pushed off the fence.

“On the contrary, Fiona.” Penny tilted her head to one side and held up a finger. “I do not, in fact, know how she is.”

“Once she decides she likes you,” said Fiona, “there’s no going back. And if you say you like something, she decides you need one.”

“I was not aware that she liked me.”

“Oh, you’re just too cute.” Fiona laughed. “She does!”

“I thought she didn’t like people from the city.”

“No, she just doesn’t like Robyn, because she thinks Robyn is greedy.”

“Robyn, greedy?” Wasn’t she known for helping the poor? “I don’t understand.”

“You didn’t even know you were asking for something, but Robyn isn’t shy about it!”

At that moment, Robyn Hill’s head poked out from behind the woven blanket strung partway across the door. “What about me?”

“You’re greedy, honey.”

“Uh-huh,” said Robyn. “I like stuff.”

Penny blinked at her. “Don’t you steal from the rich and help the poor?”

“I’m not admitting to anything,” Robyn said. Then she winked and stepped all the way outside. “She’s rich, I’m poor. But I ask nice.”

“No, you don’t, dear. You whine.”

“Ugh. I can’t get away with nothin’ around here.” Robyn glanced at Penny and shrugged. “Except, well, I can. You know. Tribal land.” Being married to Fiona was a big reason Atlas could never lock Robyn up for long; she was considered a tribal citizen under the Thyme clan’s jurisdiction.

Penny knew all the laws, and she was very proud of that!

Fiona frowned. “Robyn, be nice.”

“I’m nice,” said Robyn. “So is there some kind of sheep problem out here, or can I get a kiss?”

“Did you feed our fur babies? I just sent them in.”

“Maybe,” said Robyn. She leaned down.

Fiona rolled her eyes, smiled in exasperation, wrapped her arms around Robyn’s neck, and kissed her.

“I love you,” said Robyn.

“I love you, too,” said Fiona. “Did you feed the dogs?”

“I’m gonna be honest with you here. That jerky looked delicious, and I ate it for lunch.”

Fiona hummed.

“And, um, I got other things to do now, so.”

Fiona hummed again.

“Yeah, okay,” said Robyn.

Fiona smiled, kissed her a second time, and pushed her lightly back toward the longhouse.

It was getting dark fast, so Penny gave her report quickly. Ostensibly, that was her reason for visiting. Part of her job was to liaise with the people, but that had quickly also turned to friendship.

Fiona nodded along, periodically asking Penny questions about the information, as she unpacked her mountain gear and hung up her snow boots in favor of lighter slippers. She invited Penny in, but Penny had to decline.

She didn’t want to make anyone worry, and the General especially always worried if she flew back in too late. He didn’t say it, but she could see. She would protect the General from worry!

Well. She would try. Her efforts did not seem to be entirely working.

He had seemed easier to talk to for a while. But lately, he was often lost in thought. Maybe, someday soon, she could get up the courage to ask why he was always up late, late enough to see her and talk but not move from the desk or the window. He didn’t move, even after Penny said good night and left, glancing back toward him as she flew, until she couldn’t see him anymore.

What if he didn’t want her to notice? What if talking to him made him work more?

She was supposed to be a protector, just like him, and she didn’t want to worry anyone.

###

Another ball. Another night. Another time asking if Qrow would give Clover a chance, and this time, Qrow said yes.

The feel of Qrow against Clover’s body nearly drowned out the music. Clover had to rely on his luck, since he could hardly see what was around them. Qrow’s shoulders moving under that deep burgundy waistcoat, his red cloak swirling as though it was a constant shield and a cradle for them, and his face with its intense focus as though he took Clover’s heart as seriously as his safety when they went out to fight.

Clover shivered as the song ended and drew him in closer, and Qrow let him, although his sharp eyes grew misty and anxious. Under Clover’s hands, Qrow tensed then, even as he clung. Clover waited for him, standing still under candelabra light. The dance floor cleared, and the players took intermission.

Sure enough, Qrow said, “Clover…”

Clover smiled encouragingly down at him, down the small distance. “How are you feeling?”

“Really good.” He looked away. He sounded sad. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what it is.”

“I’ve had a couple bad spots in my life,” said Clover. He rubbed Qrow’s arm, and Qrow’s eyes returned to him. “They weren’t all bad all the time. But when good things happened, or I started to pull out of it, it was strange. It actually hurt to feel better, in a way.”

Qrow was nodding. “Yeah.” He huffed and looked away again. “Sometimes I can’t believe this. You really do get me.”

“How about we take a break? You can check on the kids, and I’ll check on James. He always has a hard time at these things.”

“Sure. Take pictures.”

“I’ve actually got a few I could show you after this.” Clover couldn’t resist keeping a small stash—some of James barely tolerating Jacques Schnee while Winter Schnee enjoyed it in the background, but mostly unguarded shots that were simply so _him_ , such as James very seriously selecting pastries from banquet tables.

He kept a hand on Qrow’s arm and guided them off the dance floor. He snagged a soda from a waiter and fitted the can into Qrow’s hand, then turned him toward his nieces, who had settled down to rest at a table with their friends and plates of sweet treats arrayed around them. He slid his hand down to take Qrow’s and bowed over it, pressing a kiss to his knuckles, before drawing back and releasing him.

Qrow flushed. And it might have been Clover’s imagination, but his hair also seemed to slightly fluff, like his namesake might raise feathers.

Clover found James in full dress uniform, surrounded by people Clover knew he didn’t like and their spouses, which Clover also knew exacerbated the issue. James never came accompanied to any of these events, and everyone always wanted him to explain it. He had no one there only to look out for him—no one to bring him refreshments, no one to cut in for a dance when he needed a rescue.

Well, Clover thought that was a shame.

He strode up, already in his best dancer’s step, and rested a hand on James’s right arm. “Sir,” he said, “can I borrow you from our guests?”

James’s eyes flicked down to Clover’s hand on him with an emotion anyone who didn’t know them would not understand. “Of course,” he said.

Clover drew him away. “Do you remember your first promotion here at headquarters?” Clover’s, too, of course. James always picked Clover as his deputy, so they rose up together through the ranks, all the way to where they were now: James the righteous head and Clover the supportive shoulders over the Atlas military. “Do you remember the party? How we were already catching it for our old man taste in music?”

It was so hard to get James to relax these days, but now, he smiled. “I remember. How could I forget, when I can count on one hand the functions here I’ve actually enjoyed?”

It had been easier then, with a smaller circle. Smaller crowds of bloodsucking insects to take what James always too eagerly offered them. And especially that favor Clover truly wanted: James’s time.

It sounded so simple, but time was what James had the least of these days. If Clover asked, he knew James would give as much as he wanted, but he also knew it would all come out of James’s sleep. Seeing James so overwrought and exhausted, Clover hadn’t felt right asking for anything himself, until it got to the point where he hardly would, especially lately. He knew James would never refuse, even—especially—if giving of himself would kill him. But maybe not asking had been the wrong course. Maybe there was a way, in barely stolen moments like this, to borrow against what they already built and the memories where they broke free from pain.

“Do you remember,” said Clover, “the dance we came up with for your favorite song?”

_(“How do you know that’s my favorite song?”)_

_(“You blast it through those cheap earbuds of yours all the time. Give me some credit, James.”)_

James chuckled. “How could I forget?”

“Do you think you’d still be able to do it, if we heard that song right now?”

James started to speak, then frowned. He eyed Clover suspiciously.

“Although,” said Clover, “if we did, that would either mean I talked to the DJ, or that we had an incredible stroke of luck.”

“You didn’t,” said James.

“Then, for plausible deniability’s sake, we’ll say it was luck.”

_(“You also sing it all the time.”)_

_(“Really? I do?”)_

_(“I knew all the lyrics before I even knew the name.”)_

_(“You don’t know all the lyrics.”)_

_(“One night in Atlas makes a hard man humble; not much between despair and ecstasy! / One night in Atlas makes the tough guys tumble; can’t be too careful with your company!”)_

_(“Well. I guess I’d better sit down.”)_

_(“You’re talking to a tourist — whose every move’s among the purest! / I get my kicks above the waistline, sunshine!”)_

Clover had talked to the band. He’d talked to them months ago, because he’d been planning this. He’d wanted this for years, to relive it, to get James dancing again, to give him an excuse. He told them tonight to play the song first after the intermission, and to let intermission last until he gave them the signal. The only luck now was that the floor was still clear, but it wouldn’t stay that way if they didn’t get on it fast.

“Clover, I want to,” said James, “but what will people think about the General—”

“James,” said Clover. “How about you just relax and be James again for me? Let’s do something fun. I miss you.”

“Oh,” said James. “You aren’t just asking for my sake? You want this?”

“Give me your hand, but it’s not a sacrifice,” said Clover. “If I see your eyes glow, I will drop you on the dip, okay?” (Except he’d never, actually.)

James eyes twinkled. But it wasn’t his semblance then—it wasn’t the heartbreaking way he surged and bled light. He looked happy. He actually looked happy again. It was so good to see him happy, Clover could have cried. So, he thought: fuck it. And he doubled down. He pulled James into a hug. People had too much anxiety about these things. Maybe people were looking, but they had their own cares. The world didn’t end.

“I love you so much,” said Clover, “and I’m so happy you are the way you are. Now come on, let’s dance. I know you want to show the big wigs how it’s done.”

Everybody knew the General didn’t dance, and even the most ambitious social climbers had stopped asking. So it was a probably a little more surprising for Atlas than the hug when the music started and they got into it, promptly forgetting everything else around them.

The most incriminating part of this dance was that Clover and James came up with it sober. They made a completely unimpaired decision at an official function to devise this classic rock and disco breakdance routine with lifts, dips, shadowboxing, and other buffoonery when they had full control over all their faculties. In mitigation, it was a long time ago. In aggravation, they didn’t regret it, and they were doing it again. And Clover couldn’t stop smiling as wide as his lips would go, because he was so happy to be prying joy from the world’s clutches with James again.

When the song stopped and the dance was done, Clover let James go back to business for a while, and then he went over to where Qrow sat with his nieces.

“Uncle Qrow hates that song,” said Yang.

“I don’t hate it,” said Qrow. “It just reminds me of something I screwed up a long time ago.” He watched James pensively.

“Well,” said Clover, “maybe it doesn’t have to be like that forever.” He wasn’t sure what all went wrong between Qrow and James when they were young and over the course of their lives, but James seemed to want to bridge that gap now. Clover had a feeling they’d manage it. It seemed like an old hurt for them that both men might finally be at the right place in their lives to mend.

###

It was nearly time. James led the way out of his office, on that sixth day after he felt like the world stopped. That was nearly six days he had to live with himself. It was harder than it had ever been.

The guards were robotic, and more there to hold Qrow up than to hold him captive. No force in the world could hold Qrow Branwen if he didn’t want to be held. If he didn’t believe he deserved it. The man wasn’t eating. He was wasting away. He reportedly slept more than was healthy, but the shadows under his eyes grew darker each day, and haunting as the grave.

It was good the day had finally come. It was good the communications finally got through, and that Penny would help. Whatever James said apparently moved her, as did his promise she could collect Qrow, once Qrow had been returned that which would make him willing to be set free.

“Where are we going?” asked Qrow.

They went down to the vault.

“James, say something,” said Qrow.

He didn’t.

The wind howled beneath the vault, and it was exactly what James needed to hear. It was like a voice or a song, like exactly what was in his heart. It brought the urge to sob welling up in his chest. It was like his life was a tragic play, and he was finally watching the ending scene. It was such a relief. He felt he was outside his body, watching himself from Qrow’s eyes. He saw the uncompromising lines of his coat and the half of it not moving with his breaths.

That half of him was holy. It was the most private, intimate expression of who he was. It was the greatest thing he’d ever done. All he wanted was to be the man who’d done that, to be again the man who sacrificed himself, who had the privilege of that chance in front of him and jumped on it without hesitation.

Finally, James turned toward Qrow. Penny hadn’t arrived yet, so he might as well say something.

Qrow, for once in the past week, didn’t look angry. He looked confused. He looked worried. For what, James couldn’t imagine. Not for James’s safety, or his own, certainly. Maybe for both of their sanity.

“When I was young,” said James, “no one wanted me. So, when I got old enough, I offered my life to anyone who would take it. The only ones who accepted my offer were the Atlas military. Ozpin found me through them, of course.”

James had never talked about his childhood. He had never talked about his recruitment. He exploited Qrow’s avoidance of those subjects, so that he could keep his weakness to himself. It would not do if the strong General admitted he needed to sacrifice. It would not do if the world knew he could have ended up laying himself on any altar at all, in service to anyone who would hurt him as they accepted him, so he could feel he was earning it.

“As you can probably guess, Clover’s and my path crossed early in our careers. We were in a bad situation.”

Qrow narrowed his eyes. Clover’s name sparked some interest, of course, and some anger, in him again. “What did you do, James?” he said. “Why did Clover trust you with his life?”

“It’s related to how I got my prosthetics. Everyone knows I’m sensitive about them.” James shifted so that he bore more weight on his metal leg. He passed his left thumb across the back of his right hand. “You’re probably like the rest. You think I’m self conscious or ashamed. But they are the most important part of me. They are a medal of honor I can always feel, reminding me of the greatest thing I’ve ever done. But I don’t think everyone deserves that story.

“You think I’m a tin man. You think I’m heartless. But my metal half is where my heart really is. I don’t show my steel and my soul to everyone. I value that the way you do your flesh and blood. My choices and my sacrifices make me more human, not less.”

Qrow looked like he didn’t know what to say.

Behind him: “General?”

James looked over his shoulder—then turned fully back toward the vault. Penny had arrived, and there were clear coolant tears in her eyes.

“I’m sorry, Penny,” he said. “I should have thought. I didn’t mean for you to hear that. I didn’t want to upset you.”

“General—” She bit her lip and clutched her dress, shaking as though she felt the same howling current of emotion inside her that James did, hugging herself as though she could barely hold it in. “Do you mean that? Your metal half is— _snf_ —the most real part of you?”

Oh, Penny.

She was still a child.

They got children caught up in this war.

James looked at the place where he stood when he shot… when he shot…

It had been Ozpin he saw standing there with his time-grinding cane and green avarice flashing in his eyes.

But it was Oscar he shot. A boy no older than his Penny. Someone under his protection.

That was what they told him.

He couldn’t explain it.

He distinctly remembered seeing Ozpin there in his black coat with his silver hair. His glasses. His green scarf. His arrogance. He heard Ozpin’s voice daring to speak to him as though they were still friends. He felt so angry. So betrayed. He hated Ozpin, yet he still missed him, mourned for him. He shouldn’t be there. He shouldn’t be back. So James pulled the trigger and sent him plummeting to the limbo of eternity from whence he came.

Then he wasn’t sure how much time passed as he stared into the empty space. It was like the lights went out in his mind and his body was fixed in time.

They told James later it was Oscar he shot, and he believed them. In the memory he could try to see it, to face what he had done. But Ozpin was layered over the poor boy, the pale stolen visage always waiting, coveting James like the pawn he’d always been. James knew for certain that he was born to do Oz’s work more than anyone Oz had ever met. And gods, did Ozpin use him, sacrificing him again and again, drop by drop, thrown back to the battle as soon as he could stand, rather than let him die and be done with it.

When James had walked up to the altar, he wanted them to make it quick. Instead, he spent his whole life there, praying to be finished and put out of his misery. The world only wanted pieces of him at a time. Only one person in his life had wanted his whole soul—and, for reasons he still couldn’t comprehend, that person wanted him to live.

Clover.

I’m so sorry.

I can’t do anything right.

He walked up to Penny and rested his gloved metal hand on her head. “Of course I mean it, Penny.”

She gave a choked cry, lunged forward, and hugged him.

He didn’t know how to be a friend, or to be a father, the right way. He only knew how to carry his mistakes.

“Penny,” he said, “the relic is inside the vault. I need to hold it for a moment. Do you remember the backup system we discussed?”

The Atlas military had long ago developed methods of siphoning off the relic’s energy into batteries. That energy was volatile, however, and would not store for more than half an hour before dissipating. Electricity was not the power’s native state, much to the annoyance of military engineers who wished it could refuel ships and weapons. So, for lifting the city, they kept batteries constantly in the core circuit, so that when the relic had to be studied or used, Atlas would not fall. The design of this system was an Atlas state secret, even more so than the relic itself. Under the circumstances, however, James thought it wise to let Qrow and Penny know that a short term backup did exist.

Penny drew back, wiped her eyes, and nodded.

She opened the vault. The interior was crystalline. The Staff glowed on a plinth at the center. James waited at the vault entrance as Penny went in, plucked the relic like a peony flower, and brought it back. She passed it into James’s open hand.

James hadn’t told anyone what would happen yet. This was knowledge shared only with James by Ozpin, and James had only told Clover.

“Penny,” said James, “this will be strange. I’m going to disappear, but don’t worry. I am going somewhere else, but it won’t hurt.”

“I don’t understand, General.” Penny looked around them, at the sheer drop-offs to the ice cold abyss. “Where will you go?”

“It’s magic, Penny.” James swallowed. He had no regrets about this. He felt no hesitation. But he was still starting to choke up. “A friend from where I’m going will be here holding the Staff in my place. He’ll let you have it, so take it and quickly put it back. Close the vault, and take Qrow and our friend with you back to Ruby. If they want to go. They might need some time first. Do you have all of that?”

“Yes, General.”

“Good.” James smiled at her. He wished he could have done better as one of her creators, but Pietro had done well enough for all of them, and continued to do so. Pietro modeled many virtues for her; James could only teach service. She took so well to all of their hopes. Her spirit was a gift to her and those she befriended.

“James?” said Qrow. “What’s going on?” He looked so lost.

“Qrow,” said James, “my friend. It’s selfish of me to wait at all, but I’ll say one last thing.” He thought of how it had felt to hug him, and when Qrow hugged him back. “I don’t mean this the way you meant it. But it’s the greatest thing I can feel. I love you. I really love you. I hope you’ll believe that one day. I want you to know how fortunate I feel to be the one to do what I’m about to do. I’ve always felt lucky I met you. I know you still think I’m heartless, but I hope you’ll change your mind about that. You may never believe it, Qrow, but this is how I love you.”

He thought of the decisions he made long ago.

The Staff flashed, and the world drained to white.

###

James found himself standing in front of a house.

It looked like Tai’s, backed against a forest, and it wasn’t finished yet. Windows leaned against the walls, waiting to be installed. Planks rested next to tools and timber beams. Beside the empty door frame, a sign waited to be hung. It was carved and painted with a clover and a wing.

James heard hammering around one side of the house. He picked his way under an arch and through the garden to investigate.

It was Clover, hanging up siding.

He was as hale and hearty as James had ever seen him—relaxed, even, smiling. He wore standard issue running clothes, with rank marks on his shoulders and an embroidered red sash around his arm. For an instant, James could appreciate him in profile, a vision of who Clover could be in peacetime, building a real life and the family he deserved.

Then Clover paused. He must have spotted James’s movement out of the corner of his eye. He hung the hammer by its back on the wood he just nailed up and turned. “Huh? James?” He was grinning, but he also looked confused. He bounded over quickly and gripped James by the upper arms. “Wow. Time flies. I thought you weren’t supposed to get here for a while.”

“What is all this?”

“Here. Come and see.” Clover took James by the arm and led him to a drawing board. A blueprint was sketched out on it. “This is the kitchen. This is the gym. And your bedroom is right here, next to the workshop and the library.”

“My bedroom?”

“Well, yeah. You have a place with us. The place you want. It’ll all work out, you know.”

Clover waved his hand across the rest of the diagram, pointing out features. There were rooms for Qrow’s nieces, for Penny, for everyone. The design of it somehow wasn’t crowded. There were workshop wings and outbuildings, and a planned pier off a lake almost hidden a ways off behind the trees.

“All of this, so far,” said James. “Did you do it yourself?” He couldn’t help clinging to Clover’s free arm, and Clover didn’t seem to mind.

“Well, not all of it. Some of this just can’t be a one person job. But I’ve had a lot of visitors coming by to help. You just missed a red-haired girl, actually. She said she was one of Qrow’s students.”

“Pyrrha,” said James. “That was Pyrrha Nikos. She died at the Fall of Beacon.” Qrow taught other red haired girls who fell, but somehow James knew Pyrrha was the one who had come.

“I know you’re not supposed to be here yet. Does this mean…” He looked behind James suddenly, fear and hope warring on his face. “Where’s Qrow? Is he okay? What happened?”

“He’s alive.” James ached as Clover let out a breath; that worry he exhaled was James’s fault. “But he’s… not good. Clover, I…” James swallowed hard. He blinked against a hot welling of tears.

“Hey, no. It’s okay.”

“No, it’s not. Clover, I _am_ supposed to be here right now. This is all my fault. I’m here to bring you back.”

“Oh.” Clover whistled. “I got it. The staff of creation. You know you don’t have to do that.”

“Of course I have to—”

“You can be there for him, too.”

“He loves you.”

“He loves you, too.”

“But you can _love him back!_ ”

Clover flinched. James realized he’d raised his voice and pulled back, ashamed. But Clover held on to him. Wouldn’t let him go. He cocked his eyebrow and said, “And what makes you think what you feel doesn’t count?”

“Because I can’t…”

“He can’t blame you for that.”

James steeled himself. “No. He used to. When we were young. But we’re old enough we’ve been over that bridge and back. What I really can’t do is let you take the fall for my mistake.”

The challenging look in Clover’s eyes faded. “Oh. Your damn integrity. Your convictions. That I get.”

“I just want to do something I know is right.”

“It can also be the right thing to stick around and be there for him.”

“You did more for him this year than I could in twenty.”

“I think a lot of other things probably also happened in those twenty years.”

“Clover.” James forced himself to admit what he should have said years ago. The ultimate, selfish truth of his selflessness. The glutton for punishment that he was. “You know that this is where I’ve always been headed, and it’s all I ever asked for.” The fall. The validation of it. He might not be able to give people he loved what they needed, or to see what choice was right, but he could suffer and sacrifice better than anyone. That was how he could pretend he deserved them.

Somewhere along the line, he started thinking the decisions that hurt him the most must be right. If it didn’t hurt him, it couldn’t be real.

“I found something,” said James, “someone, worth giving my life for a long time ago, you know. I found you. I found both of you. I’ve fought and tried so hard for so long. Please just let me finish the job.” All his life, he wanted someone to value his life enough to let him lay it down for them.

Clover just looked at him for a moment, sadly. “You’re a lot alike.”

“I don’t know about that.” James really didn’t see it. Qrow was courageous, with so much grit and fire, while James was forever running away. Qrow had a stubborn and selfless spirit; James passed an aching, constant, cavernous, lonely need off as duty and righteousness. “Clover, please do this for me.”

“Only you would see this as me doing you the favor.”

“It’s the truth. Take my hand.”

“You don’t owe this to me. You deserve more time out there as much as I do.”

“I don’t want to regret not doing this forever.”

Clover gave James that look, like he was going to argue more or call James on the shameless guilt trip. But he hesitated as he looked at James—looked at him, as he always had, with respect. James was never sure what he’d done to deserve that. Then Clover said: “Okay.” He slid his hands down to take James’s, the right one, the one now metal that had been flesh when he gave it to Clover before. “One more time.”

In the spiritual fabric of this place, James felt an echo of memory. For a moment, he saw tundra and mountains around them, the slopes supporting boreal forest. He saw Clover the way they’d been back then, but without the storm they weathered, no fear or evil. Then it was gone, and Clover stood in front of James again, both of them together in the garden of the home Clover was building like a promise of peace for everyone.

“You have such a big heart,” said Clover. “I love you, James.”

“I love you, Clover,” James managed, and he really did, all because Clover knew exactly how and how deeply James meant it.

For a moment, overlapping the feeling of Clover in his right hand, James also felt the relic. He felt it pulse. He felt the bond between himself and Clover like a physical force, and he engraved the sight of Clover in front of him in his mind, the warmth and strength of him, in what he knew was their last moment together for a long while, and then—

And then James was alone.

He sent Clover back to Qrow and to the war.

Finally, for James, it was time to give up and to rest.

James picked up the hammer. He walked back around to the front of the house, and he knelt by the sign he saw earlier. He saw a silver filigree border starting to take shape around the mechanical wing and the vibrant clover. It almost looked like the enameling on his custom sidearm, Due Process’s, frame—

No.

Wipe it away.

He didn’t deserve it.

He wouldn’t accept it.

He hadn’t paid enough for it.

Slowly, like ink out of paper, the pattern faded.

Relieved, James stepped back.

He’d always known that being the one to fall was the only heaven he could accept. Now that he’d finally been allowed to do it, he wanted no half measures. Maybe someday he could deserve a place like what Clover’s good nature imagined. But not today. Today, while his friends lived, he would build their place in heaven.

Let me be the man who holds the hammer.

Let me reach out my hand.

Let me be that person again.

He didn’t realize his clothing had changed until much later, as he looked into the lake in the forest while building the pier. He wore physical training clothes like what Clover had worn. The rank was the same as when he met Clover outside the barracks all those years ago. Yet he also kept his metal half, so dear to him, the constant physical reminder of the greatest act of love he had the chance to make in his life.

This was eternity. This was to be heaven. In this place, his protection was no longer needed. Still, James hoped that when his friends came here, they would still accept him.

###

Their life together flashed in front of Clover.

He saw James reaching out his hand. James blocking the truck’s driver side door—snowflakes in his dark hair, duffel bag over his shoulder, and determination in his eyes. James making him sleep and driving through the night in the whiteout on their doomed mission.

James, jumping first on the grenade. The feel of James under him when it went off and took half that colossal body away like the proof James always said he wanted: that he was human, that everyone would see he was human, that he wasn’t untouchable after all.

Clasping James’s hand in the hospital. Doing it again when they danced their first time together in celebration after their promotion, after they survived—and doing it at the Atlas ball in front of everyone because no politics or expectations could keep Clover away from love. If he let himself fail to reach back out to James, against the fear, he too would regret it forever.

Then Clover was in the vault. He breathed in, and the smell of the air was not of anything in particular, except an instinct in him that _knew_ and said this was the smell of hugging James. That breath felt like a balm inside him. He felt that it might take a while, but everything would somehow be all right eventually, and it would be all right for all of them.

He saw Qrow. He released the relic into Penny’s care, smiled, and spread his arms wide.

“Hey there,” he called Qrow, and winked, “lucky charm! You gonna kiss me like you missed me?”

They had time to believe, and hold on.

###

James sat on the end of the pier he had built for Clover on the lake. He felt someone approach—someone who had visited before, someone who always said the same thing.

“Why do you stay?” they asked. “You’re not dead. Your semblance protected you. The choice you made gave the staff all the power it needed.”

He suspected as much, yet he had hoped against it. He had hoped he was done making choices.

“This is not the lesson for you,” the someone said. “Death is not how you are meant to learn the value of your life.”

“It’s not forever,” said James. This was the first time he had answered, after all the someone’s visits. He hadn’t been able to answer before. But he was starting to feel like he could, now.

“You can go back,” they said.

James wasn’t ready yet. He wouldn’t be for a while. He needed time to give more, and to rest, before he could let go of the need to hurt and fall for his friends. He wasn’t able to accept yet that he could live and be at peace with them instead.

It was difficult, and he had to build it like the house. He had to build it like the garden and the pier.

But he remembered he could return—and one day, after the war, he did.


	4. Coming Home

James found himself standing in front of a different house.

By the state of the garden, it must be near April.

He looked down at himself; he wore his dress uniform.

There had been a day in April when James walked in a uniform like this across a stage. He walked, and he accepted his license as a hunter and a soldier of Atlas. He had the sense that he was prying it from the world’s cold, unwilling hands. He’d felt a grim pride, and a relief. The shadow of his past still bound him so completely then he could hardly walk, and he’d been alone.

But he wasn’t alone anymore. He had chosen to come home.

He approached the house, and he knocked on the door.

Clover answered it, saw him—and froze in a moment of pure shock.

In that moment, James tried to think of something right to say. But before he could either find words good enough or give up, Clover lunged forward and threw his arms around James. He squeezed hard, buried his face in James’s shoulder, and managed two muffled words: “You’re alive.”

###

Before that, there had been other words James wasn’t around to hear.

“Hey, buddy,” said Clover, the way he said it on many a night. He leaned against the side of a post on the back porch. He put the binder he and James had written in on the planks on his other side, and he cradled a cup of coffee in his hands. It was late, but he needed the smell and the taste and the warmth and the weight. He looked out at the starlight.

It wasn’t like he saw the stars as some stand-in for James, or like he was symbolized by any of the other details. But the pieces each and together gave him a feeling that reminded him of being with James, and he talked to that feeling.

Clover knew Qrow worried about him when he took time outside like this. When Clover said he needed to walk alone, or when he went into the spare room with star charts and a bed that wasn’t for guests. Someone even asked once if they had lost a child, so reverently did Clover guard, build, and preserve that space.

“No,” Clover had said, and he got up and left. He went into the room, and before he closed the door he heard Qrow explaining. Qrow tried, but even he couldn’t understand.

Clover had no delusions James would suddenly appear. It wasn’t that he thought James would need a space. But that place, and outside, and in so many little things—that was where the feeling lived, the feeling somewhere between being with James and not being able to be with him anymore, of loving and of missing him. He clung to that ache which felt oddly like comfort.

I still need you, he thought, and he bowed his head down, pressing his chin into his collarbone. I love you. You’re part of me, James.

###

“Hang on,” Clover said, and squeezed tighter, every time James shifted in the slightest, “I’m not done yet.”

That warmed James deep enough it brought tears to his eyes. He held Clover in return, gratefully. Although James had needed his rest, in the other place, there would never be a separation between him and Clover when he couldn’t say it had been too long. It had always been that way between them, and it likely always would.

“You’re _back_ ,” said Clover. “How?”

“It was my semblance,” said James. “And luck, I think. The choice I made created enough power to fuel your way back, apparently. The relic didn’t need to take my life. But I did stay in that place, for a while. It took a while before I could accept this.”

Good luck that he was spared. Bad luck he didn’t achieve what he intended. But ultimately, a choice that was left up to him.

“You came back,” said Clover. He relaxed his hold slowly, but he didn’t let go, eventually gripping James at the shoulders with half a foot between them and a wide grin on his face.

“Well. I do have a promise to keep. Something about always needing me?” James looked significantly at Clover’s well chosen, but unfortunately rumpled, red and green accented jacket. “I know it took me a while. I worried I’d be too late. But if this is what I think it is… Am I interrupting a fitting?”

“Oh!” Clover started. “Oh, no. James, the wedding is today. I’m getting married to Qrow today. I thought you were my old team knocking. They were helping me, but they had to run off and help him—”

“Say no more,” said James. Formal dress and ceremony, yes, this he could handle. “May I come in?”

Clover took James’s hand and turned on his heel. He crossed over the house’s threshold, and he went inside, pulling James behind him. It was a good thing he was holding on to James. That way, James had a reason to follow him so closely, without hesitation, trying to fight a welling of fear. He saw Clover on his wedding day, and Clover walking away from him. No, please, he thought, don’t leave me alone.

“All right,” said Clover, “first, they sent two shirts, and neither of them fit—”

James found himself released abruptly in a room set up for dressing with multiple mirrors. He watched Clover buzz around drawers and cabinets. He looked like this before at least one ball James could remember, and he’d had the same issue. James sighed. “Get over here, and hold out your arms.”

Clover did, and James fixed him up. It was always the collar and the cufflinks. Clover always did those wrong when he was under stress, perhaps because his usual attire didn’t get him in the habit. What did he wear these days? How much time had passed? He’d already been graying when James… when James left. James could never quite figure out how time worked in the afterlife. He had thought he stayed away several years, but Clover couldn’t have aged more than five—in fact, five would be stretching it.

James convinced Clover to take off the shirt again, because now that it hung on him right, anyone could see it had been inadequately pressed. He found an ironing board and rectified the situation himself, then packaged Clover back into the ensemble and flicked off every last speck of dust. With mock solemnity, he said, “I think you’ll represent us well, Mr. Ebi-Branwen.”

“James,” hissed Clover, “you can’t say that yet!”

“Why not?”

“Don’t jinx it!”

“How long were you engaged?”

“Uh. A while.”

James scoffed.

Clover smiled weakly. “I know, it’s just...”

James waited for him to find the words.

“… This is so hard for him, you know? He still thinks he’ll mess everything up. If everything doesn’t go perfectly, he could blame himself and run away. I’ve had nightmares, and it breaks my heart to see him still have these days where he puts himself down for every little thing in the world. I’ve tried so hard to make every detail perfect for him today, but it’s all falling apart at the last second, and I—”

James hugged him.

“I’m glad you’re here,” whispered Clover.

“You should trust him,” said James.

“I know.”

“Of course he’s still afraid. He’s facing that because he wants to be with you. It’s because he wants that so much that it’s still one of the hardest things he’s ever done. Listen, Clover, if what I’ve heard from other people is any indication, you will remember everything about how he looks today. You will remember forever what he looks like when he doesn’t run away. Relax, and let him make you proud.”

Clover breathed deep against James’s arms and nodded, and James let him go. He cooperated through the rest, the ironing and the adjustments, and he let James take care of him.

James told him quietly about how the house was turning out, about the people who visited, about the simple concrete sensations and the moments the pieces came together. More could be done. More could always be done. But he had reached a satisfaction in it, a point where he’d be proud to re-approach and reimagine the blueprint with Clover beside him, one day.

Finally, James said, “What time is it? Should we go?”

Clover glanced anxiously at the clock. “We’re doing okay. But, yeah. James, one more thing—”

“I know, I’ve been gone, I won’t displace your new best man—”

“About that. I had this odd feeling.”

“You didn’t pick anyone else for it?”

Clover smiled sheepishly and spread his hands. “I told them it was a surprise. I was going to make a statement that you were here in spirit. It didn’t feel right if it wasn’t you.”

“You’re lucky you’re so—”

“Lucky?”

James snorted. He glanced around, checked Clover’s suit one more time, checked his own, and steered Clover out the door, even as Clover kept turning toward James and trying to say, “James, there really is one more thing—”

James asked, “Did we forget something?”

“No, it’s not that, it’s something for you.”

“Then it can wait. This is your day, Clover.” James turned his head away, remembering too late to hide the flash of energy he felt in his eyes. Was he quick enough? Did Clover see?

“But—”

“There you are!”

Outside, a tall woman with long, blowout blonde hair and a prosthetic arm revved up a motorbike that looked like it could tow forty train cars.

“Yang,” said James, astonished. She’d never looked as young as her sister Ruby, but my, how she’d grown: taller and stronger, and in her confidence.

“What the— _General Ironwood_?” She whipped off her sunglasses. “You’re alive?”

“It’s him,” said Clover. “Best friend, the reason I’m still here—”

“I know, okay?”

“Told you my best man was a surprise—”

“I know, I won’t punch him, just get on the bike.”

“Where’s Taiyang?”

“I’m your ride. Dad’s car broke down.”

“I thought we hired a—”

“Yeah, that was after the limo broke down. And Zwei lost the rings.”

Clover blanched. “Zwei what? Your corgi? Why did Zwei have the—”

“Ugh. Long story. We’re handling it. Come on, we’ve got to go.”

Clover scrambled up behind her. He jammed a ready helmet on his head. Yang put hers on, and then fished another out of the side cargo hatch.

James just stood there for a moment before he realized Yang was waiting on him.

“What,” she demanded, “you think my bike can’t take it?”

Well. James climbed up behind Clover. He took the helmet from Yang and saw an engraving on the back. It was a simple line of text with the model: HUGH-CIV. James didn’t know what to think about that. He put the thought and the memory away for later, and he put the helmet on.

And they were off.

James tried to identify where they were. He thought it was Patch. It was hard to tell even the most basic details with the way Yang tore up the country road.

They finally made it to a driveway, and—yes, this was Taiyang’s house. It was done up and populated with wedding flowers and guests, faces from what felt like a lifetime ago milling amongst still more James didn’t know. They probably kept this a private affair, but considering the size of the teams and the families, that came out to more than a handful, and quite a chaos of vehicles.

Yang threw out a spray of gravel as she turned the bike into a sliding stop, and then she leapt off. “Radical, right?” she said, laughing. “Uncle Clover helped me build it!” She ran for the house, calling out for her father and asking after the progress of the... replacement cake?

James saw Ren and Nora through a window. They were wearing aprons and covered in frosting, and they were arguing with Robyn Hill, who was angrily eating a gigantic piece of cake.

“Hey,” said Clover, “James—”

James tapped his shoulder and pointed to the window. Taiyang had burst onto the scene. He dumped two giant burlap sacks on the ground in the middle of Ren, Nora, and Robyn, threw his hands up in the air, whirled in circles as he tried to talk to all three of them at once, and then stormed off again.

“He’s probably fine,” said Clover.

“Oh, I know.”

“Qrow, on the other hand.” Clover sighed and pressed the heel of his palm to his forehead. “I don’t know if it’s better if the two of them don’t get to panic together. Did you know the bachelor party on their end involved trying to get all his bad luck out of the way? And absolutely nothing went wrong?”

“That is a little alarming,” said James. “Funny, but alarming.”

“James,” Clover groaned.

“All right, all right. Let’s see if there’s something we can do. Do they need anyone… digging latrines?”

“Taiyang has a bathroom, James.”

“Well, this seems like a lot of people. I’m just being proactive.”

“I’ve never understood how you fly under the radar as this big of a clown.”

“Most of the time, you helped.” Almost nobody could tell when their leg was being pulled, if James and Clover both kept a poker face. “Now. Since you’re not in favor of my previous idea. We could issue parking tickets—”

“ _James._ ”

“—or stack presents.”

“About that,” said Clover. “I didn’t know you left me your money.”

“You didn’t?” James thought it would have been obvious.

“I mean… Wow, James. It was a lot.”

“I hope you found some use for it.”

“You financed everything in our campaign against Salem. None of the kids ever went hungry. Then rebuilding, charity, and anything else I thought would have made you happy.”

“That’s wonderful.” It did make him happy. “If you have any left, you should pay for the wedding.” This time he remembered to turn his head quickly enough. He hoped the movement looked natural—but when he dared glance back at Clover, he found his old friend waiting with an unimpressed look and one raised eyebrow.

“Actually, the kids insisted on covering that. But I do have some from you left.”

“You had a feeling,” guessed James.

“Exactly.”

After that, James noticed Clover sticking closer to him. They rushed around, learning pieces of the various wedding preparation disaster stories. James had thought Clover was worrying too much earlier, but clearly, at least some of that had been warranted. Sure, everything always went wrong at weddings—but this still seemed a little much.

Everyone was surprised to see James, but not as surprised as he expected. And not as angry, either. Maybe there was simply too much going on. Maybe the time that had been allowed to go by had put them in the right place to see him again, too.

“What did you tell them?” asked James, filling a flower vase, as Clover drew a wing on a paper lantern, in a peculiar island of stability everyone else seemed to be granting them as they worked, elbow to elbow, Clover leaning against him, at the coffee table.

“I told them,” said Clover, “I loved them, but you and me are a package deal dead or alive, and if they wanted to say a word against you, they’d better not do it in front of me.”

“I,” said James, and swallowed hard, “that’s—I meant—”

“I know what you meant. I told them you used some experimental, secret Atlas technology. Traded yourself to save me.” He shrugged. “Which is what happened. Basically. Except I also said the tech you used was destroyed in the process.”

“So you still agree with me. You don’t think the world should know.”

“I gave Penny and Qrow the chance to disagree with me, but they didn’t say anything, either. I don’t know if we’re doing the right thing by keeping the secret. But it hurts too much to think about putting that decision in front of anybody.” He kept his eyes fixed on his handiwork.

“Well,” said James, “it’s easy to change a no to a yes, but it’s almost impossible to put a genie back in the bottle.”

“And it’s not a bad place.”

“No, it’s not.”

They folded napkins. They set out chairs. They filled baskets with herbs and paper blessings and put them on the patio. Eventually, up the driveway came a group pushing a limousine. Weiss lounged in the front seat, Zwei in her lap and with the windows rolled down, while other people James recognized after a few moments’ effort pushed at the back and at any part of the vehicle they could grip: Ruby, Blake, Oscar (they said the boy survived, but what a relief to finally see that for himself), Marrow, and somehow Fiona Thyme, who was garbed in the formal, traditional attire of her heritage.

How did Robyn Hill and her wife end up swiping wedding cakes and pushing limousines in Patch?

“What,” said James, “did you people _do_ while I was gone?”

“Saved the world,” said Clover. “Proposed marriage. And waited for you to come home.”

###

It was a little different, maybe, for Clover, than it was for other people. The waiting. Clover knew, after all, where he and James were both going. He knew they’d see each other again. But that didn’t make him miss James less.

Clover had talked to Qrow. He talked with his dad. He talked about it when the kids asked. He wanted them to understand.

One day when Clover had to excuse himself after talking all he could to Oscar, he’d seen Qrow reach out and pat the boy’s shoulder, and he’d heard Qrow say quietly, “That was something you don’t want to forget. He never talks about that.”

There were reasons why he didn’t. Reasons Clover wasn’t sure words would ever be enough to express. But he tried. He had to try. He remembered a day in a hospital when he made his father a promise.

He talked to his dad about the dust. They talked about war and the job. They flew back to Atlas in the middle of the night sometimes and went into secure vaults when they needed to tell stories they’d sworn never to discuss outside.

He talked to his dad again, really talked, and asked about things he’d been wondering. There was something buried in the conversation they had long ago, the one where Clover had been young and focused on himself and not really listening. There was something that he hadn’t realized the significance of until he met James over ten years later.

So Clover asked Dad to tell him again how he felt and who he was. He asked Dad, too, why he got so angry when he heard Clover avoiding calling their community the queer community, and their history queer history. That involved about ten books, a photo album, and another conversation.

“It’s my history,” said Dad. “I get angry because up here,” he tapped his head, “I’m still there. And I’m still angry. You weren’t there when people you thought were your friends marched with signs that said ‘drop the T’.” He rolled one shoulder and shrugged. “People like that want us fighting ourselves, getting smaller, saying some letters come first or are more important than others. Don’t even get me started on how nobody bothers to write the A. That’s how you kill people. You make them think they’re nothing.”

James, thought Clover, looking down at his clenched hands. At one of the old, faint scars from the blast that they both tried to save each other from. That wasn’t nothing.

He learned his father was like James, and there were words for what that meant. Asexual, Clover would say to himself, aromantic, and he sewed the pride flags and put them up over where he kept his and James’s old handwritten binder, in the room where Clover went sometimes when he remembered him.

That helped, and talking about James helped. Especially the good times, but also the sad times.

Maybe I should try, thought Clover one day, making a list of it.

All the remembering he’d been doing reminded him: they had never written down the rest of their lives together.

So he got another binder and filled it up with the good things, the sad things, the things that were special in any way because they shared them. He wrote about all the little habits James had. He wrote the moments and layers and stories of their life together down, and he put them into a second binder he kept sheltered next to the first.

He didn’t only write about the past. He wrote about all the small things he saw these days that made him think, “James would like this,” or “I know just what James would say right now.” Those moments were always bittersweet, and they lingered. It helped to do something with them.

He wrote about how he saw James. How he saw James struggle to live and how he ached and hurt. How desperately Clover wanted him back, wanted every moment with him back, wanted more.

He’d always find himself holding out the pen for James to take, once he had switched already from his left hand to his right and both of them were tired and throbbing like his body used to do when he and James went to the gym, or when they went running beneath open sky together in the morning when the sun wasn’t up yet, when they faced the world together—back when Clover thought he would have so much more time with James and his big heart.

###

Qrow crashed in just in time to say his vows. James never got the full story of everything he had to conquer to attend, but he knew the bulk of it had been Qrow’s own fear, and he saw that Clover knew that, too.

They held the reception in the clearing between the garden and the trees. Speeches wouldn’t be given until later, apparently, and James wasn’t sure where he should go. He wasn’t ready to talk to Qrow yet. Due to the rush and the wedding chaos, the circumstance hadn’t been forced upon him. Even when Qrow landed not an arm’s length from James, he’d only had eyes for Clover. Maybe it was better if they stayed that way. James abruptly felt alone here, and he felt himself sliding backward.

He had never wanted to be other than what he was, in terms of his orientation. But he had wished other people were like him, so that his differences were accepted. So that he had a place. Functions like this—weddings, particularly, and even though he saw his friends happy—reminded him he had to pretend to be fine with this story.

And then.

At a table off of the packed-earth dance floor, Clover’s father sat, lounging with a glass in his hand of what looked like pure melted chocolate from the cauldron at the sweet fondue station. He wore an Atlas formal uniform with the sleeves ripped off, and bracers and rings and lucky charms in arrangements of colors that looked both familiar and intentional, for some reason. Purple-white-silver-black; green-white-silver-black; and then a two-sided loose necktie that stitched them together, studded with a pin of blue and orange feathers.

“Still can’t bring myself to wear the pink in the transgender flag,” said Felix. “But the feathers are what I tattooed around my scars when I transitioned to a man. The tie is asexual and aromantic. No romantic or sexual attraction. Not-interested. Around the time we thought you died, I thought I’d finally stop messing around and be loud about it.”

“So there’s a name,” said James. “I thought it was just me.”

He felt something then. He felt free. Better.

“By total coincidence,” said Felix, “blue and orange also ended up being flag colors for us, but I was just going for something like a kingfisher bird. That’s a family crest thing, long story. You can use it, too.” He kicked the chair next to him. “Come on. I’ve been saving you a spot for over fifteen years.”

James sat down. He thought about the start of those years, when they met in the hospital, and all the time after that. He’d always wanted to ask Felix about himself, whether they could be the same, but he’d been afraid, and he hadn’t known how to start. He hadn’t known the words. He hadn’t known there could be words, so he thought he must be alone.

“I got to confess something,” said Felix. “I shouldn’t have let our children fight a war. But I just couldn’t anymore.”

“I understand,” said James.

In front of that stage in Atlas he walked across so long ago, before he took his oath, he had attended an orientation lecture in that auditorium. There, he had seen the place where the military hung a vest with blood on it from a fallen soldier. They wanted you to know what you were getting into. James had seen it and thought: that’s exactly what I came here for. Take me where the battle is; hang me up there, one day.

But whoever that soldier was, James’s thoughts then must have been the last thing they wanted. Some of his instructors, at least, had been good people. He knew now they had wanted to protect him.

The falling had to stop somewhere. And maybe now, for a while, it finally had.

“I spent my life,” said Felix, “pushing papers, because I never wanted to fight again. I couldn’t always avoid it. But I tried.”

“I don’t want to fight again, either,” said James.

They watched the party together.

Maria Calavera trailed in, blinking her bionic eyes irritably. “Hmph,” she said. “I see someone hasn’t moved in the last hour.” She settled into a chair on Felix’s other side. She gave no indication that James’s presence was in any way unusual.

“Somebody’s got to keep this chair from blowing away,” said Felix.

“Hmph. You’re just old. You’re not spry like me.”

“That’s what I keep telling the V.A.”

“You’re not retired.”

“Damn right, not until they give me disability benefits.”

“Ugh,” said Yang, “old people.” She stood arm in arm with Blake, both at the end of a dance. According to Clover, the two women were engaged, and now that James was looking he could see their complementary rings. “Hey, gramps.”

“Hey, sport. So you made up your mind? You like the grandpa thing?”

“Yeah.”

“You know that means you got to learn how to fish.”

“Uncle Clover lets me punch the water, and the fish run right into my fist!”

“I don’t know where I went wrong with that boy,” said Felix. “You got to do it right. Just put a tarp down in the bottom of the boat and watch ‘em jump in.”

James made a note to himself to add one more story to his best man speech: the time Clover tried that very thing when the two of them went fishing, and so many fish threw themselves into the boat that it nearly sank. He smiled at the memory. He found himself relaxing further in his chair. He rubbed his shoulder when he felt one flicker of the phantom sensation, as he sometimes still did when his body went from tight-strung to settled. He listened with the rest as Blake cleared her throat and began describing ways of serving fish, along with the cookbook her publishing house would release soon. It sounded like she was doing well for herself, and she seemed deservedly proud.

A break arrived in the conversation. James hadn’t quite managed to come up with a way yet to congratulate Blake without stealing the spotlight from her, so he figured he’d let it wait until later.

And that was when Ruby launched herself into view. She came out of nowhere, red cloak swirling, arms flailing, reaching for Felix’s chocolate. “Hey new grandpa—what’ve you got, can I see—”

Felix flailed in return, desperately holding the cup out of her reach. “Settle down, scout!”

“Uh,” said James. He felt he should say something. Out of anyone, Ruby and he probably argued the most last time they met.

“General Ironwood!” Instantly, Ruby’s attention turned to him. She left off Felix—much to the older man’s relief—and was at James’s side in a blink. “So it’s true.” The carefree enthusiasm drained out of her, and she hesitated. “You’re really here.” She’d grown lean and dangerous like her uncle, but she was still short. There were scarred gouges of varying width, angles, and paleness skirting all around her silver eyes, as though many villains had tried to take them in the war, yet all—either through skill or luck—had missed.

“I’m sorry,” said James. “I can’t fully explain what I did.”

“Can you try?” said Ruby.

They were all watching him—Felix and Maria and Blake and Yang and Ruby. James took a deep breath.

He’d thought about this for so long. He’d had this conversation over and over again with himself. The answers he’d come to weren’t really good enough. But he’d learned to stop and make do with them. He said, “I thought I would be the one who paid the highest price for my decisions. That made them right enough to me, until they went very wrong.” He shifted and let his eyes rest on the tablecloth. “I asked too much of you and so many people, because it’s what I ask of myself. I’ve always had a hard time remembering that isn’t fair.”

“Penny was really sad,” said Ruby. “Uncle Qrow and Clover were, too.”

“I’m sorry.” (Where was Penny? thought James. Probably Atlas. That would be another hard conversation.)

“Some of us,” said Yang, “were pretty pissed. You left us with a big job.”

“How did you do it?”

“Um,” said Ruby. “It’s kind of hard to explain. Did you know about who Oz used to be? All the… different people, and stuff?”

James nodded. “Salem, the gods, the cycle, and the rest.”

“Oh. Okay. So, basically… We were all fighting her… and we didn’t realize Oz didn’t have to die to go to a new body. Or that Oz could be a woman, too.”

“Oh,” said James. He had known Oz was fluid, and that they generally embraced the identity of their current host—but he didn’t know about Oz being able to change bodies without death. Maybe Oz hadn’t even known yet. “So. Salem?”

Yang said, “They got to be together again. Forever. Maybe.”

“They said they were going away for a while,” said Blake. “We haven’t heard anything since.”

“I saw them,” said Qrow.

James hadn’t heard him approach. Qrow had a way of doing that.

“They’re kind of just walking around,” said Qrow. “I think they’re getting to know each other again.” He stuck his hands in his suit’s pockets. “Hey, Jimmy.”

James thought he would freeze when this moment came. But he didn’t. He didn’t feel the fear or guilt he thought he would. “Hello, Qrow.”

“I heard you were building a house.”

“It’s not finished yet.”

“That’s how it goes.”

James thought about Leo. Leo had come to visit him in the afterlife, and James had been surprised that his primary feeling on seeing the old headmaster was fondness. Leo had been close to tears, and he apologized. He said that he was just so scared, and he said he was sorry. James couldn’t truly feel angry. After all, he understood weakness better than anyone. When he realized he was at peace with Leo, he started to at least want to let himself feel more at peace with Oz. And, eventually, more at peace with himself.

“James?” Qrow was holding out a hand to him.

He missed something. “I’m sorry, Qrow, what was that?”

“I said, maybe you’d do that first after-the-wedding dance thing with me.”

“Really?” Normally a family member got the honor. And why?

“I keep thinking about that night at the Atlas Ball,” said Qrow. “I don’t know if you know what it’s like, to have all this regret inside you. Just having to feel it like you’re pulling at stitches, and seeing it in the mirror every day for years. I screwed up bad when we were young. I thought that meant I screwed up forever. I had a lot of things like that. Turns out things change. And when it comes to growing up, forty and fifty ain’t nothing.” He said it like no one else was listening. Maybe he wanted them to know.

“It’s all right if you’re still angry with me.”

“Nah. It took a while, but I’m not angry anymore. I just feel tired, when I think about how I blamed you. I can’t even blame myself. Not for that, anyway.” Qrow smiled and shrugged one shoulder. He held out his hand again. “Turns out some bridges don’t burn. So how about that dance?”

James hadn’t expected he’d ever have this chance, but he didn’t question it further—and said yes.

They danced a simple, increasingly sweeping waltz. James hadn’t done this in a while, had rarely done it at all in his life, but Qrow was a skilled leader. He turned stumbles into flourishes, with the practiced ease of a lifetime both of charm and bad luck.

“I missed you,” said Qrow, “and I missed so much time with you. When I say I got regrets, what I mean is, I’m sorry. I’m sorry about all the things I said. I’ve been sorry since the moment I said them.”

“Clover told me,” said James, “once, that we’re a lot alike. I don’t know if you’ve figured this out yet, but he’s always right about everything. At the time, I said I didn’t see it. But I think now I do.” He’d had time to think about their past—and conversations they had, or failed to have. One James always left silent was the black hole of his past. “Clover and I went through something together in the middle of our lives. You and I… There was the other war, of course. Oz’s. But from when we met, and from what you’ve said since, I think there was something earlier.”

“From before we met—” Qrow nearly tripped, but he caught them both again. Whatever he’d been doing, however he’d been practicing with his bad luck since James left, it seemed to have been good for him. “You said something to me in the vault. You said… Nobody wanted you. That was what it was like for me, too.”

“You’ve said. I—you know, I’ve never talked about it. I don’t know if I ever will. But I always had this sense you’d be someone who could understand.”

“I felt like you’d been there, too, somehow. It helped.”

“I’m glad.”

Qrow hesitated. “There was something else, too,” he said. “You feel like nobody sees you, right? Like there was this big conspiracy that kept you from even seeing yourself?”

“As dramatic as it sounds, yes. I only found out today.”

“Like Mr. Ebi, right? Saw you talking to him.”

“Yes.” He still couldn’t quite believe it. He wasn’t the only one. He knew who he was.

“That’s great. I mean it. I see you, okay? I want you to know. I get it now.” He tensed for a moment. “I know how important that is.”

“You have something, too, don’t you?” It wasn’t really a question. Qrow had told him before.

Qrow nodded. He kept nodding for a while, and then he rolled his eyes. He said, “I’m having the weirdest bi panic. I’m marrying an amazing man, and I’m happy about that. But now people are gonna think I’m just gay. I used to have the opposite problem. People thinking I was straight. And I feel like you’re maybe one of the only people who’s gonna really understand how weird this feels. How bad I want to still be seen. It always meant a lot you did that for me. Saw me.”

“Well, that was never going to be a short term commitment. I’m here. I’ll help you.”

“Thanks. Me for you, too.” Qrow coughed, let a half smile show, and said, “There we go again. A lot alike, huh.”

“Why _is_ Clover always right about everything?”

“Don’t let him hear you say that. I got a long married life with Mr. ‘I Had A Feeling’ ahead of me.” Qrow looked at him sidelong. “Gonna need your help to make that work, too. That’s _my_ ‘I got a feelin’’.”

James tried not to allow the sudden sinking sensation in him to reach his face. “Of course. I won’t steal too much of him.”

“What—” Qrow growled. “Stop it. I see that light. That’s not what I meant, Jimmy, tell your semblance to go home. What I was trying to say is the damn opposite.”

“Oh.”

“If you could please walk him when he springs out of bed at four every morning, singing Atlas reveilles and ready to take on the world, that would be much appreciated.”

“Hm,” said James. He closed his eyes a moment, forced himself to relax. He forced the fear and the buzzing energy down. Then he raised an eyebrow and said: “He’s sleeping in now? Good for him.”

“You big goof,” said Qrow, “You always were funnier than you got credit for. Nicer. I missed you.”

“I missed you, too.”

Qrow’s steps slowed. He shook his head. He ended up leaning against James’s chest, eyes misty, in the silence. “I don’t know if I can do anything about all that regret,” he said. “But I want to do something different than what I did before. You always saw me. I want to see you, too. I want to still be the guy you could tell that story of yours to. Can you give me that chance?”

“I think I can,” said James.

They stepped off the floor. There, before they had a chance to say anything further, Clover came striding up with a look of determination in his eyes. He glanced between James and Qrow once, quick, worriedly—before he relaxed a fraction. His shoulders still looked like pure anxiety.

Qrow said, “You want to borrow your best man?”

Clover said, “That would be _great._ ” He leaned in toward Qrow and kissed him quick, before grabbing James’s right hand—James only had to tell Clover once how much he wanted that at every opportunity from him, and Clover went out of his way to do it ever since.

As luck would have it, that was also when James’s old favorite song from the Atlas Ball came on.

“Now that,” said James, “really takes me back.”

“James,” said Clover. He was smiling, but there was a frantic look in his eyes. “I’ve got to tell you something.”

“We’ll need a simpler dance than our usual, then. Let’s see if I remember how to lead. You can relax.”

Clover kept close to James’s right side. Imperfect form was perfect for them, even if they’d win no competitions. He followed James, and the words tumbled out of him: “I found words that might work for you. People who talk about what they feel the same way.”

“I’m asexual and aromantic,” said James. “I understand there’s a pride flag?”

“Oh,” Clover’s shoulders sagged in relief. He gave an exhausted smile. “You found Dad.”

“Is that what you were trying to tell me all day?”

“Yeah. You had to wait your whole life for this. I didn’t want you to wait another second.” Clover squeezed his hand. “I have the flags at home. I’ll give them to you after this. And I’ve got a room—with a skylight. You can stay there. I know you get down on yourself around three in the A.M. Now you can look up at the stars without even getting out of bed.”

“The flags,” said James, “the room, and the song, and keeping me as best man. Why?”

“Because my life,” said Clover, “and my home, and even my wedding aren’t just about me. I wanted today to be about all the people I love, who I want to keep sharing my life. Qrow feels the same way. That was half the point, you know. Weddings are one of the only ways you can make everybody come see you at the same time. Qrow and I planned it all out. We put songs on the playlist for everybody in our lives. We’ve learned so much. We felt like our wedding, and our love—well, it’s _us_. We can’t stop ourselves from adopting everyone. Don’t laugh, you’re the same way.”

“I know,” said James, “I’m laughing because it’s true. And I’m grateful. And I think that’s wonderful. And I love you, too.”

After that, Clover cajoled a second dance out of his father, and James barely had time to wonder what to do next before:

“General!”

He heard Penny.

“General! Sal… u…”

She was louder. He turned his head, prepared to speak, wondering what he could even say—and saw her right _there_ and felt her _slam_ against him and grab him in her arms.

“—tations!”

His feet left the ground, but he didn’t fall; she barely slowed in her flight and carried him up with her, soaring away from the clearing and above the tallest trees in an instant and into the sky.

He’d been on a lot of airships in his life. He always loved flying. But in that moment, he had never felt closer to the stars.

“General!” Penny cried. “You’re back!”

“Hello, Penny,” James managed.

“Hello, General! Hello!”

They kept climbing upward, and he could see forever.

“General, look how high I can go! I have magic now! Look what I can do with snow!”

She tossed him up, and she made a loop beneath him. Then she dove, and he landed on something soft and cold.

It was a ramp of some kind—smooth ice with packed snow on the sides. He found himself sliding down already, quickly gaining speed, on a slope that built itself in front of him.

Penny conjured loops and tunnels and slides, and she directed him along them as she flew just ahead. She made ramps that launched him up and into the air. He learned to expect them and to land neatly on platforms that she built in exactly the right position. She must have been able to hold them up and together somehow, because he could jump between them and climb across clouds, before she built another slide for him and he took it, continuing down.

“You’re almost there!” cried Penny. “Go, General, go!”

Finally, he landed in a drift on the ground. He breathed deep, leaned back on his hands, craned his head, and watched Penny float down from above. Snow soaked his clothes, but he didn’t care. His face hurt from smiling.

“General,” said Penny. She knelt down and beamed at him. “You came back!”

“You,” said James, “are so creative, strong, and genuine. I’m so happy to see you, Penny. I’m so proud you’re my daughter.”

He started to lean forward, and he braced himself to get up.

But Penny surged forward and threw her arms around him.

So he hugged her back and stayed put.

Penny gave a muffled sniff. “You are good at saying nice things.”

“You’ve really grown up,” he said.

“You, too, General.”

“Thank you.”

“I thought I’d never get to play obstacle-course with you again.”

When the research and development team raised Penny, Pietro said that like any child, she would need guardians who spent time with her. It was also critical for children to be able to develop their spatial, motor, and sensory skills. They needed space to move, and a playground where they could explore and safely make mistakes.

That was where Penny’s obstacle course in Amity Arena came from, and how James knew it so well. He had been the one always willing to race when Penny asked. They spent hours at a time up there, sometimes all day, continuing over the years. James loved teaching Penny how to outmaneuver even the cleverest opponents. Clover devised their challenges and plotted routes, and he pitched in as a third player more often than not. Other times, James spotted him simply watching with a smile on his face off to the side, with stacks of tablets spread around him crunching data.

“I love you, Penny,” said James.

“I love you, too, General,” she said. “Thank you for coming back.”

She helped him stand up. She laughed as he dusted snow off his clothes, and she flung a handful more over him again when he wasn’t looking.

Then another young voice said: “So this is where you went.”

James stilled. He turned his head.

Oscar stood at the edge of the pile of snow with both his gloved hands resting on a cane. He regarded James and Penny with raised eyebrows.

James forced his voice to come out steady. “Did I do that?” he asked. He nodded at the cane.

“Oh, no,” said Oscar. “Planting’s just hard on my knees. And, well, Oz drove me up the wall sometimes, too, but I miss them. This might be a different cane, but if I carry it and don’t think too hard, I can almost trick myself into thinking they’re still around.”

“That sounds like it’s been difficult either way.”

“I don’t know.” Oscar tilted his head, then tapped his temple with one hand. “Maybe I’m not meant to always be alone up here. It kind of felt right. Having company. Being able to trade off and take a break. Maybe somebody else will move in someday.” He frowned. “Maybe someone who likes shelling peas. Whitley’s a good partner, but I’m worried they’re getting _too_ into farm work, honestly.”

“Oscar, I have to be direct about this. Are you angry with me? Do you want me to leave?”

“I’m probably supposed to feel that way,” said Oscar. “But the war took a while, James. I ended up hurting people who didn’t deserve it, too.”

There was something in his eyes when he said that. James had to lean on Penny, where she gripped him.

Oscar asked, “Did I say something?”

“You don’t know,” said James, “how hard we tried. To save you. From having to fight.”

“I think I do,” Oscar replied, words as kindly as they were tired.

James saw the moments of violence that broke up long, endless, tense stretches of waiting, all behind him and around him, swirling and pressing into his chest and between his shoulders. He was outside himself watching snow and cinders fall. And glowing inside him there was a moment he had wanted to be his last, but that ended up sustaining him and connecting him, eventually, to a way forward. To a decision he made to live.

Penny tugged on James’ arm, making him look down at her. She said, “It’s all right. We won, General. You don’t have to worry anymore.”

James bowed his head. He wanted to tell them: nobody wins a war. But if they didn’t know that yet, maybe he’d done enough after all.

He let them walk him back to the reception, with Oscar twirling his cane on James’s left side and Penny holding James’s hand on his right.

###

James and Qrow took a walk. They kicked up dust along the edge of the woods in the fading sunlight.

James thought back to what he’d thought would be their final goodbye. He felt he had his answer now for what he told Qrow in the vault, and he felt like he finally shared in the world’s new peace.

“So,” said Qrow. He rolled his shoulder and stuck his hands in his pockets. ”The world’s been saved. What are you going to do next?”

“Well,” said James, “I’m not sure how old I’m supposed to be, or where the technology is. But I think I’ll study, start a new career, and go to space. I always wanted to be an astronaut.”

And it took a while, but that was what he did.

###

James went to the moon, and he came back.

He went to a new international space station orbiting Remnant, and then he came back. 

He decided he didn’t want to go to other planets. So he retired and started another career again, as a guide at a museum of astronomy, air, and space.

The museum had its own functioning scientific observatory, and it was located where he could walk to work each day. He could also walk easily to Qrow and Clover’s house, and they to his, which happened a couple times weekly—if James wasn’t simply staying over, which he did about half the time.

Clover and James still exercised together, and Clover finally got James into fishing. Sometimes, they went with the whole group of formally and informally adopted kids. And everybody’s grandkids. Qrow didn’t much enjoy fishing, but he did like to use his shapeshifting ability to become a bird and find the best perch on a nearby tree, where he’d pass the time getting into arguments with every other bird in the woods.

And of course there was Felix—still running the diversity committee in the Atlas military, but calling and dropping in now and then—who had apparently decided to treat James as his son as well. That led to James telling some of the story of his childhood to Qrow, and the two of them began talking about how it felt trying to have that kind of relationship, like a parent, but for that connection and place in his mind to be good instead.

During James’s career as an astronaut, Clover had worked on Remnant’s space program on the architecture and mechanics, and Qrow—now a professor of physics—in the science department. They were always calling James from mission control, and they were always there to welcome him and wrap him in a hug when he was done and his shuttle came down. They even managed to visit him at the international science module, when Qrow got research grants and Clover devised similar excuses for himself that somehow got approved. James never had much chance to get lonely and miss his friends on his three-month to six-month stints before one or both of them came to visit for as short as two weeks or as long as a month. And Penny flew up all the time.

He met young people who wanted to grow up to work in the space program, but who were afraid they wouldn’t be accepted. He met people as old as he’d been when he came back, who told him they’d wanted to apply but felt they missed their chance. He told them all to try anyway. He wasn’t sure he was going to make it, when it came to a lot of things in his life, but he would have regretted it if he didn’t try—and he wanted to believe that for some dreams, at least, it was never too late.

###

James still had difficult days. He got down on himself often, late at night. He looked up from a science magazine and asked Clover, once: “What are people like me for?”

“I think you’re for hugging,” said Clover, instantly, since he had no filter at three A.M.

James shot an incredulous look his way but didn’t object.

Clover shifted over on the couch, wrapped both arms around him, and said, “I love you. I need you. Stay.”

###

One day, Winter came to visit. She nodded to James and said, “General.”

“General,” James returned, with a smile, and a nod to the rank marks on her shoulders.

They settled down with bitter coffee, across James’s kitchen table. They used to sit this way on either side of James’s desk—the desk in Atlas that was hers now.

“Mother left him,” said Winter, with no preamble. Her face was peaceful, her eyes closed, as she gently sipped from her cup and set it down.

“How do you feel?”

“Relieved.” Winter opened her eyes and smiled. “She’s happy. She’s volunteering. Libraries and food banks, mainly. She passed the company and the land back to the tribes, and they’re managing it. Better than he did, in fact.” Winter had always, in James’s opinion, tried too hard to give Jacques some morsel of credit, usually in his skills in business. She was a fair person, almost to a fault.

James tested the waters. “More sustainably?”

“Yes.” Winter sighed. “You were right. He was a charlatan who wasted more than he mined. That was better in the short term. Maybe better for a war. But Atlas never would have had its own dust again much beyond his lifetime, and our family would have been ruined.”

“What about now?”

“Our family,” she said, “will be fine. This is the only way we’ll be fine. We have to be more than just a corporation living under the same roof.”

“I’m proud of you,” said James.

Winter held her coffee, warming her hands. She stared into it. Finally: “Do you know,” she said, “why I requested you as my professional mentor?”

“I have no idea,” said James, “considering you never listened to a word I said.” He smiled, to show he was joking, but she didn’t look up at him.

“You never married,” she said. “I thought it was because you were simply that dedicated. You were too focused on your career.” She shook her head. “That was an insult to you, and I feel like I need to apologize.”

“Well,” said James, “I actually appreciate that. I do get a little tired of people talking about my orientation like it’s an advantage or savant-like ability. Leaders in every field date and have families. People don’t say: my goodness, if only that man hadn’t been straight he would have had so much more time for science.”

“That’s the truth. No one ever wondered how Mom’s ex-husband could run a company and still have the time to menace us.”

“It just doesn’t work that way. I don’t substitute work for connecting with people. I simply spend more time on my friends, and on people I’m lucky enough to have calling me family.” Most people probably used to think he was gay, since he never pretended to be straight. The only word he had early on that gave him any comfort was queer, but he didn’t go to the meetings. He was afraid he didn’t belong there, since the name for his place within the community—and that aid in finding people who felt what he did—had for most of his life been hidden from him. More hours at his desk couldn’t fix that like time with Clover did. “I take it you’ve given some thought to what you want from your life besides work.”

“I’m doing better,” said Winter. “I’m dating a good woman now. She’s asexual, but biromantic, like Blake. I mention it because she wants everybody to know, and Blake is her hero.” She laughed softly. “I’m happy at home. I don’t work more, or less, but somehow I get more done. I don’t know how it all happened.” She finally looked up. “I do see now there’s no compromise in the way you concentrate on your friends. And on being a mentor. I was hoping we could pick that up again.”

“Of course. I’ll always support you. That hasn’t changed.”

She visited every month or so after that. She made time for him, like she did for her siblings, like she did for the good woman who became her wife. Winter always had what it took to be a great leader in Atlas, to be the best in her work—but what James was proudest of her for was how she learned to be all of herself, too, and to go home, and be happy. That had been the hardest thing he’d ever done, but in the end, it had been worth it.

###

Street art began appearing around Remnant—vast murals on the sides of buildings. James would have thought little of it, except they began featuring his own face.

“Could be a fan,” said Clover, who spotted that first one while flipping through a newspaper. He showed the photo to James. Someone had inked a stylized outline of James at the entrance to a nonprofit store benefiting disabled youth. Apparently, the owners were thrilled and meant to keep it. It featured James with a space helmet under his arm against a backdrop of stars, all in orange, yellow, white, and light and dark blue—the colors of the asexual aromantic flag James liked best.

Two weeks later, it happened again: another mural with a similar outline, but this time with light blazing out from the heart in James’s chest, again in his colors. Qrow looked at the photo, grunted, and said, “Huh. Could be someone we know.” He sounded vaguely protective, like he might fly off and make threats.

A whole month went by. James was walking home from work when he spotted a third mural, direct and in person this time. In it, James stood at the head of a crowd of people, gesturing toward the sky. One of the people in that still-frame, illustrated crowd was Ozma.

There were very few people on Remnant who knew of Ozma, and even fewer who had seen their face.

But one detail made James certain who had put so much thought and work into sending him a message like this: script here and there, in familiar fonts and variations, which were a detail that—as far as James knew—no one but he had ever found noteworthy. In person, one on one, Oz would generally tell James how they felt that day, and how they wanted to be treated. Over a distance, in letters, or on a chalkboard, Oz used subtly different handwriting, although James was never sure how much of that was conscious or intentional. And that was the handwriting he observed in innocuous text finishes—notes on a piece of a paper held by someone in the crowd, for example—on this mural, the most detailed yet.

James took his notepad and pen out of his bag right then. He wrote a letter, and the letter said:

_I’m not ready to see you. I don’t know if I ever will be. But thank you. I didn’t think you were listening, or that you would ever make this kind of effort for me._

_I have to admit something. Every time I supported someone else, I wanted it to come back to me. I thought if I put in enough service to others, they’d eventually give me as gift as well._

_I was not right to expect that. But I have received it anyway. You have helped make me glad I went on with my life._

_I am glad you found time, finally, to learn painting like you always said you meant to. I know I am not the only one who waited a long time for my dream. When you are the wizard, when you are a man or a woman or neither or otherwise, I hope you are happy, and I sincerely wish you well._

He dropped the letter into the antique clock at Beacon, the way the two of them used to do. He had a feeling Oz was checking there, if they reached out like this. He waited a while before he could bring himself to even check for a reply. When he did, there was a tan paper letter. He waited a while to open that, too.

When he did open it, he found only drawings, sketches of memories—good ones, the two of them with coffee and hot chocolate, playing any game other than chess, because chess was where Oz disconnected, where they focused only on winning. Oz’s favorite was really a good “teaching game” of Go, shidou-go, where the tone could be gentle and almost as though they were working with James as a team.

Words from Oz would have been too much, but this. James could do this. He picked up his pen and notepad again.

Sometimes it was easier to write the letters without considering he was talking directly to anyone. He would come home from work and write about tours he gave and how excited the museum guests were, as though making a journal entry. Over time, however, thinking about Oz got easier, and so did the idea of direct communication. Eventually, they started playing Go by mail, and James would always remember the shock and relief he felt all at once when Oz sent those first actual strokes of their handwriting to him, noting their first stone’s position.

James modeled the game on a board he kept. One day, he sent another letter, and then he moved the board to his porch.

 _I’m not ready to see you yet,_ he wrote. _I don’t know if I ever will be. But I’m putting a board on my porch. I’m gone weekdays certainly from eight to fifteen hundred._

Oz made their own moves on the board after that while James was gone, and they left their envelopes in his mailbox.

Words started to flow between the two of them around the game, and then about more than the moves. Sometimes that was good, and sometimes James had to back away. Oz always matched him, sometimes drifting only back to single lines that were enough to express how James should think of them at the time of writing: _I feel like a man; think of me as a woman; I am neutral today; but a little masculine; or a little feminine; I’d want chairs pulled out and a way made before me; yet I would want to be the one opening doors for you; or only some of that; or I wouldn’t; if circumstances were permitting._

The ritual of how Oz used to make that kind of confession when they used to be friends had been one of James’ favorite things. He hadn’t been sure how many people Oz was open with, but he knew the directness was an expression of trust and importance, and he treasured that.

He didn’t know if circumstances would ever be permitting. He didn’t know if that would ever settle and be okay again within him. He believed not every relationship needed to be repaired, but also that the process didn’t have to be all or nothing. He decided to just keep feeling it out, not pressuring himself to always add back planks to this particular bridge, only sometimes to walk forward to the brink, and sometimes to move back. He felt he was healthier with some distance, that he wanted to restore something but not everything, that he wanted to keep contact in certain ways and in others have space, and Oz seemed to understand.

###

All of this good time walking with his head held high, into the future, and James still thought back to the day he came home.

In the evening, after the wedding, James had been stacking the folding chairs and scrubbing the homespun tablecloths. He had been breathing deep under the wide sky and waiting for the stars to come out overhead. He always wanted to live like this, farther out in the country, the better to see them, and now—now he had every chance.

“Hey,” said Clover, “buddy.” He came up and threw an arm around James’s shoulders, and he looked with James up toward the sky. “It’s looking pretty good out here. I think you might have got more done than me.”

“I got distracted,” said James. “There’s still a lot of work left.”

“I think we’ve done enough for today.”

The landscape here wasn’t that different from the place where James had been—where he and Clover both had been, before they came back. James had worked there, too, on the house and on himself. He’d clung to the thought he had to finish before he could get back to living. But eventually something had shifted in him, and he thought there might not be such a thing as being finished.

James said, “I’m doing better. But I’m not better all the way. This is still going to be hard for me.”

“I know,” said Clover. “It’s okay. I have some of that going on, too.” He leaned into James, even as he hugged tight enough to make James lean on him. “I started getting shaky in there. I got to missing you more and more until I couldn’t stand it. I could see you through the window, but I still had to come out here. I’m probably going to be clingy for a while.”

“I’m all right with that.”

“Honestly, I might be clingy forever.”

James realized then what he had nearly done—or what he nearly hadn’t. No wonder getting to here had been so hard, if it was this important. He hadn’t been weak, and he hadn’t been doing it wrong.

Maybe there was nothing wrong with him for having wounds that would always need tending. It was, perhaps, not a failure, if they couldn’t heal all the way, or that he would always feel a scar.

“I’m just so glad you came home.”

He was home. The word resonated so deep it startled him. It warmed him and welled up through his chest, and he felt heat that might become tears behind his eyes. Sometimes he forgot what words really meant until Clover said them.

He might never have known some words, if not for knowing him.

“James?” Clover was giving him that look again. The old familiar knowing one that wasn’t about to let him fall away.

But it’s finally all right. You don’t have to worry. I don’t want to fall anymore.

“I was just thinking,” said James, “That house of yours didn’t seem too far. How about we don’t impose more on your new in-laws, and go for a run?”

Before Clover could answer, a black bird swooped down on their heads, squawking loudly, buffeting Clover’s hair with one broad black wing and then flapping away down the farmhouse’s dirt road.

“You see,” said James. “Your husband’s on my side.”

“You know what,” said Clover, “okay. We don’t live where we put my suit on, though. Our place is the other way. It’s closer.”

“I’m ready when you are,” said James.

They started jogging like they had down uncountable dirt, gravel, and pavement roads, once in frost and now in the spring, following the crow whose feathers shone against the bright stars of the country night.

James always had a dream that felt farther away than those stars. That more impossible hope was the one he reached today, and the one he was glad to be living: He knew himself better. He had people who knew him.

And being known was how he came home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading. It’s been a journey, and I appreciate the community’s support.
> 
> Important: Please continue to help me out and avoid discussing volume 8 onward, or RWBY writer commentary on James’s prosthetics, in the comments.
> 
> The backstory for Felix Ebi is also part of his backstory in my other work where he appears, “My Father’s House”. In fact, except for extra magic, most people’s backstories can be read the same between here and there.
> 
> In regards to chapter titles: “Your Shelter” is from “Shelter” by Corinne May. “Always Be There” is from “Citizen Soldier” by Three Doors Down. “My Soul Is Here to Stay” is from “Iceberg Meadows” by Crawdad Republic. “Coming Home” is from “Coming Home (Part II / Bonus Track)” by Skylar Grey (the soft one, not the “feat”). The overall story title comes from James's theme as heard late in V7, and a couple lines from there are quoted or referenced. The Atlas ball song/James's favorite is a Remnant version of "One Night in Bangkok" by Murray Head.
> 
> For anyone interested in a playlist for this story: “Shelter” by Corinne May , “To Die For” by Sam Smith, “Under Your Scars” by Godsmack, “Citizen Soldier” by Three Doors Down , “One Night in Bangkok” by Murray Head, “Iceberg Meadows” by Crawdad Republic, “Pasture” by Down Like Silver, “Frozen Pines” by Lord Huron, “Coming Home (Part II / Bonus Track)” by Skylar Grey, and “I’m Still Here” by John Rzeznik.


End file.
